Word: orchestra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...popular image of the orchestra conductor is that of a grand seigneur: imperious, authoritarian and, more often than not, old. Concert music, goes the conventional wisdom, is something so emotionally and spiritually complex that no one who has not reached at least his 60th year can possibly plumb its depths. What Beethoven, who died at 56, Mozart, who died at 35, or Schubert, who died at 31, would have thought of this manifestly ridiculous proposition hardly needs asking...
...scrupulously separates the clarinetist from the comedian and never tells a joke on the bandstand: when Woody is playing jazz, he's all stick and no shtick. Not that funny things haven't happened in connection with Woody's music. When he and his New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra first got together in the early '70s, they were summarily ejected from the first few clubs they played in because their music was so noncommercial. At one establishment, the band was fired in the middle of a particularly lugubrious spiritual, after the owner's child tugged on trumpeter John Bucher...
MALCOLM MCLAREN AND THE BOOTZILLA ORCHESTRA: WALTZ DARLING (Epic). Berserk and beautiful: classical waltz music funked up for dancing by rock's baddest bad boy. McLaren is like a compact-disc version of Ken Russell -- funny, vulgar and endlessly inventive...
However offbeat the part -- and she has played everything from a shaved- headed musician in the Auschwitz women's orchestra (Playing for Time) to / the transsexual physician Renee Richards (Second Serve) -- Redgrave never camps up a performance, never tips the audience the equivalent of a wink to distance herself from neurotic excess. She gives every character she plays her loyalty and respect. Trying to puzzle out how she achieves such artless naturalness, fellow actors gather to scrutinize her work. Says writer-director David Hare, who starred Redgrave in his movie Wetherby: "She's the one they all watch. Vanessa...
...peaked in 1982, when the woman whom Redgrave was playing called for her to be ousted from the Emmy-winning lead in Arthur Miller's CBS-TV drama Playing for Time. Politics also excluded her from being cast in the Broadway drama Plenty. That same year, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, allegedly fearful of disruptions and of losing donor support, dumped Redgrave from scheduled performances as narrator of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. She brought a civil rights suit pleading that "people's livelihoods should not depend upon their holding 'correct' political views." The U.S. Supreme Court last January rejected...