Word: conductor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This past Saturday was a night of firsts for guests of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In an all-French program, acclaimed Italian conductor, Fabio Luisi, and French pianistic upstart, Lise de la Salle, made their BSO debuts. While the concert did not feature the careful artistic consideration the BSO lends to its usual program of heavier masterworks, Luisi and de la Salle substituted a delightful helping of flair for the conventional dose of substance—a move that was quite appropriate for the lighter musical fare these particular pieces offered...
...regular Indian and Pakistani worshippers without judgment, speculation or high-flown abstraction. He just sets the scene around them, presents some historical background and lets them tell their stories. A prison warden explains how he takes off two months every year to become (along with a waiter, a bus conductor and a man who collects coconut juice) a divinely possessed dancer. A Tibetan monk recalls how he found himself taking up arms against Chinese invaders. A temple dancer - or sacred prostitute, in effect - remembers how her father sold her off to a shepherd, when...
...then handed down the Ten Commandments, a reluctant George Washington led the colonists to victory, then presided over the drafting of the Constitution. The parallel was not lost. Two-thirds of the eulogies at Washington's death compared the "leader and father of the American nation" to the "first conductor of the Jewish nation...
...messages. As Frederick Douglass wrote, when he and his comrades sang, "O Canaan, sweet Canaan,/ I am bound for the land of Canaan," overseers believed they were worshipping the white god. But to them, it meant they were about to escape on the Underground Railroad. The movement's famous conductor, Harriet Tubman, was called the Moses of her people...
...there a duet playing in the back of his mind, I wonder, when Sir Edward Downes, the former conductor of Britain's Royal Opera, held hands with his wife of 54 years and drank the poison with her? Wagner maybe, or Verdi's Aida, one lover condemned to die, the other choosing to follow rather than live half a life, all alone...