Word: conductor
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While Chicago music lovers were squirming last winter under the worst Chicago operas they had ever heard. Conductor Ebba Sundstrom was swooping her Woman's Symphony Orchestra through its tenth, most gratifying season (TIME, Dec. 16, 1935). Long before her last concert it became clear that the Opera's loss was the Symphony's gain, that the woman's orchestra might look for more subscriptions, bigger patrons this autumn. Flushed with success, many patrons felt that a more dynamic, impressive conductor than Ebba Sundstrom should be billed. As a compromise, they packed her off to Europe...
...When the conductor took her familiar, choppy steps across the stage and mounted the podium, she faced 200-odd singers as ruddy-faced, golden-haired and Nordic as herself. At her feet, lost in the dusk and their black dresses, sat the 80 women who make up her orchestra. To pay her respects to Scandinavia and the thousands of Chicagoans who came from there, Conductor Sundstrom had planned a predominantly Swedish program, packed the stage with Chicago's Swedish Choral Society, brought with her Swedish Contralto Gertrud Wettergren, the big, brown-haired, rawboned Valkyrie who first sang with...
With long, pendulum-like swings of the arm and huge, rhythmic rockings of her body from the heels up, Conductor Sundstrom carried chorus and orchestra through excerpts from Wagner's Tannhauser, Elgar's King Olaf, Grieg's Olaf Tryggvason. Heated, enthusiastic, she swung next into a Schumann symphony, had to wipe her perspiring brow after the first movement. She had picked up enough energy in her European trip to satisfy everybody and to make Daily News Critic Eugene Stinson find the orchestra "well nigh unrecognizable, so firmly has Ebba Sundstrom increased her grasp over her players since...
Blond, graceful Leopold Stokowski mounted the stand, back as guest conductor with the Orchestra he left last spring to go to Hollywood (TIME, Oct. 19). Conductor Stokowski took pains to make his first concert of the New York season glitter, made the new symphony wait till last. Devoted to Oriental instruments, he swelled the percussion section with a group of weird brass Oriental gongs, had them bong dolefully through his own transcription of music from Boris Godunov...
...Conductor Barbirolli earned better marks, and easily passed his New York entrance examination with a suave Mozart symphony and a heroic Brahms Fourth, wherein New York Times Critic Olin Downes discovered "virility, grip, lyrical opulence, and on occasion the impact of the bear's paw." Said the New York Herald Tribune's, Lawrence Oilman: "He has disclosed himself as a musician of taste and fire and intensity, electric, vital, sensitive, dynamic, experienced; as an artist who knows his way among the scores he elects to set before us, who has mastered not only his temperament but his trade...