Word: conductor
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Last Thursday, a crowd of smashingly dressed orchestra aficionados shuffled its way into Boston’s Symphony Hall, five minutes late and snatching last-minute snacks and champagne. It took conductor James Levine bursting through the upstage door to properly get their attention. With a red face and a shock of gray hair, the elated four-year Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) veteran hitched up one pant leg, propped himself up on a stool, and struck up a promising beginning to the Orchestra’s 127th season...
...extravagance of the label was just right. In both his music and his personality, Pavarotti's exuberance was multissimo. His voice - "one of those freaks of nature that comes very rarely in a hundred years," according to conductor Richard Bonynge - had a clear, penetrating timbre, alive with the resonance known to singers as "ping." At the same time it radiated a gorgeously warm romantic sheen. He produced it with an unforced, open-throated quality that Italians call lasciarsi andare - letting it pour forth...
...rain-battered August day in Edinburgh, and inside the city's Usher Hall the conductor Gustavo Dudamel is having difficulty with the strings. It is the final rehearsal of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, and Dudamel wants the violins to be more biting and caustic. Any successful performance of Shostakovich's 10th must reflect its historical context: Stalin's purges; some 20 million dead; a composer who lived in constant fear of the knock on the door. "Muchachos," Dudamel says, searching for the right expression. "Pop pop pop!" he says, mimicking the sound of a firing squad...
Simon Rattle, one of Dudamel's mentors, has called him "the most astonishingly gifted conductor I have ever come across." Daniel Barenboim and Claudio Abbado lavish similar praise on him - a virtual anointing by the three giants of European conducting. Deutsche Grammophon has given Dudamel a record deal, and, between now and mid-October he is on a high-profile European tour that will take him to historic concert halls in Germany, Sweden, Italy and France. So what makes Dudamel so special? The role of a conductor is at once comprehensible and untranslatable. The task is dauntingly clear: to mold...
...alone among serious directors who, when they make an action film, want it to be More Than. Well, forget that. Just get an audience caught up in the Bourne web. Making a good action film is its own conspicuous achievement, and Greengrass is a superb spinner of plates. And conductor of stunts. And car scenes. Bourne runs through three or four each movie - those indestructo-cars that can be rammed and smashed, spun, stripped and flipped and still outrace and outlast all pursuers...