Word: conductor
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Since the end of May, Cleveland had been canvassed for a native chorus and ballet. Rita De Leporte, the Metropolitan's première danseuse, whipped together an able troupe of 100. Giacomo Spadoni, assistant conductor and choral master of the Chicago Civic and Ravinia opera companies, selected 300 voices. For Aïda was provided a special Negro chorus led by a colored preacher. For Smetana's The Bartered Bride-"Czech national opera"-was provided the Cleveland United Czech Singing Society. A group of Welshmen were to sing specially in Die Meistersinger...
First-night audiences had already been bowled over by the sheer bulk of the production. In the pit was Conductor Cesare Sodero (formerly with La Scala, now opera conductor of NBC) surrounded by an orchestra of 90 men, most of them from the Cleveland Orchestra. Three operators regulated a $25,000 amplification system which used horns six ft. long.* Anne Roselle was Aïda. Paul Althouse, Rhadames, Pasquale Amato was Amonasro. Critics credited them with "signal ability . . . abundant breadth and vigor . . . impressive operatic authority...
Almost from pier to podium popped busy, plump little Conductor Fritz Reiner. He had just stepped off the boat from Italy the day before his first Stadium concert. Gustily he spoke of his summer doings. He had conducted in Milan, Naples, had tried to reduce at Marienbad, had peered about Venice for antiques and lace. With five cameras (two cinema) he and his wife had photographed each other climbing up the Jungfrau, standing in front of Dr. Axel Munthe's San Michele on Capri...
Usually classified as a modernist, Conductor Reiner gave in his first Stadium concert a program mostly classical. However, he told interviewers of an interest in such modern Americans as John Alden Carpenter, Aaron Copland, Roger H. Sessions and George Gershwin, who, he says, is "the only U. S. composer to have a popular following in Europe." And in his fourth concert, Conductor Reiner-who once studied for the Hungarian bar-gave a program composed of the works of four living musicians (Stravinsky, Kodaly, Ravel, Henry Hadley), two dead within the century (Debussy, Goldmark...
...honor to Siegfried Wagner, who died a year ago, a pre-Festival performance of his comic opera An allem ist Hütchen schuld (Blame It All on a Little Hat) was given in the old rococo Margrave's Opera. Came many a Wagnerite, including Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and buxom Frau Wagner who with her four children carries on the dynasty...