Word: orchestra
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Obese Orchestras. Thereafter, everybody got into the act. From Mozart to obscure professors, composers reorchestrated and rearranged The Messiah. Since everybody wanted to sing it too, the choruses became enormous, and orchestras swelled proportionately. On the theory that if Handel had had a big orchestra he would have used it, a series of uncalled-for instruments puffed Handel's clean, baroque textures into plodding Victorian obesity. This musical elephantiasis reached some sort of a climax in 1959, when Sir Thomas Beecham recorded a Messiah that sounded a bit like Richard Strauss's Elektra: with cymbals, bells, triangles...
Salvaged Season. The proposed three-year contract calls for increasing salaries to an annual $19,500 minimum for orchestra musicians, $13,400 for chorus and $11,180 for ballet dancers. The package would eventually cost the Met $3,000,000 a year. It would also make the orchestra and chorus the highest-paid in America-though they work longer hours than any comparable group...
...Free University in Berlin. At Manhattan, Gelles studied under Michael Steinberg, a distinguished musicologist who now writes reviews for the Boston Globe. Like Steinberg, Critic Gelles insists upon high musical standards. Four weeks ago in the Globe, Steinberg chided Carlo Maria Giulini, guest conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. If Danny Kaye or Victor Borge had conducted "with such crazed dislocation of tempo and with such prodigality in expression of tragic suffering and deep knee-bends," wrote Steinberg, "the audience would have been in stitches." Two weeks ago in the Herald Traveler, Gelles remarked that Guest Conductor Seiji Ozawa...
Friends of the symphony bridled. Several orchestra members signed an anti-Steinberg telegram to the Globe. The protest went unheeded. Similarly, a Symphony Orchestra board of trustees member wrote to Herald Traveler Publisher Harold E. Clancy expressing dismay that the paper had hired "one of [Steinberg's] young imitators. We think that perhaps the Herald might be in a position to alter its course...
Clancy denies that he was reacting to any pressure, but Gelles was suddenly promoted to critic at large. So far, his duties are not exactly defined; Gelles' editors have not given him any assignments. One thing is perfectly clear, though: "at large" does not include the Boston Symphony Orchestra...