Word: conductor
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...long wanted to bring Richard Strauss's Salome back to its boards. But since its last performance five years ago, with George Szell in the pit, and Soprano Lily D janel swirling Salome's seven veils, the Met had been unable to get the right conductor-singer team together to do it again, and do it well. And with New York's upstart City Opera Company getting bravos for its lively, scaled-down production (TIME, Dec. 13), the Met knew that if it revived Salome at all, it would have to be mighty good...
...Europe last summer, General Manager Edward Johnson* thought he had found the right singer: magenta-mopped Bulgarian Soprano Ljuba Welitsch, of the Vienna State Opera. Last spring, when pudgy little Fritz Reiner left the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in a huff, Johnson knew he could get the right conductor, too. Even 84-year-old Composer Strauss agreed with that. From Montreux, Switzerland, he wrote to Reiner, who had first conducted Salome under his stern gaze in Dresden 33 years ago: "That is good news. There are plenty of others who can do Brahms and Bruckner. Opera needs men like...
Even a group of musicians skilled and trained as the members of the Boston Symphony cannot play consistently well. Really thrilling performances occur at those rare instances when a carefully trained orchestra, inspired by the conductor and the music, plays "above its head" in performance...
Again I am startled and puzzled by the attitude some citizens of the artistic world have taken toward a great musical conductor, who cannot give us any good tips on how to improve our war machine, but to my mind has something much more worth while to offer...
...because of the opera's cozy attitude toward the Japanese; it was quietly restored to the repertory five months after V-J day. Since war's end, Norwegian Soprano Kirsten Flagstad had been allowed to return to U.S. concert halls (despite protests and picket lines), but German Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (TIME, Jan 17) had been told by some of the most outstanding of concert soloists that he'd better not try. Gieseking's own case had raised the biggest postwar...