Word: conductor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...league baseball, fans wait to see who is pitching before they lay their bets. With symphony orchestras, the man whom fans either cheer or boo is the conductor. Arturo Toscanini having finished 16 innings with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, a comparative rookie named Hans Wilhelm Steinberg stepped into the box last week, while veteran Bruno Walter sat by in the dugout, ready for action...
...never played since Papa Haydn conducted them for the Esterhazys a century and a half ago: Nos. 67, 71, 77, 80, 87. Having examined all the great Haydn collections, except the Esterhazys', Dr. Einstein had made diligent revisions, here deleting a spurious passage put in by an overenthusiastic conductor, there restoring an eccentric "lost" bagpipe trio, until the scores were as authentic as he could make them. After the concert, critics gave editor and performers a vigorously genial nod; so, perhaps, did Papa Haydn's harried head...
...Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, where Sergei Koussevitzky's famed Boston Symphony had announced a "concert extraordinaire." Manhattan concertgoers could see that something was up when 18th-Century ushers led them to their seats. When Boston's stiff-necked orchestra appeared in silk stockings and periwigs with Conductor Koussevitzky himself got up as Franz Joseph ("Papa") Haydn, they began to catch on. Without batting an eye, poker-faced Koussevitzky led his men through Haydn's rococo whimsey, bowed gravely, pinched out his candle and left the stage...
After another quick change, this time to their store clothes, Conductor Koussevitzky and his men gave Manhattanites their first taste of Serge Prokofieff's children's suite, Peter and the Wolf, made them whoop and giggle to hear Peter's duck (the oboe) quack mournfully inside the hungry wolf's stomach (three French horns). With the evening topped off with waltzes by Johann Strauss, Sibelius and Ravel, concertgoers felt that Henry Lee Higginson's band had kicked up its heels about as much as any self-respecting 58-year-old symphony had a right...
...Dilemma, he stopped off in Manhattan long enough to announce his future plans: a repertory company to make two Shaw pictures a year and, in 1940, a film biography of Amelia Earhart, to be made with the assistance of her husband, George Palmer Putnam, and a score by Conductor Leopold Stokowski after the expiration of his present 18-month contract with Walt Disney...