Word: conductor
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...Conductors who can rouse both their musicians and their audiences to frenzied enthusiasm are born, not made. Few seem to be born in the U.S.* But last week in Manhattan's Town Hall one budding U.S.-born conductor had Manhattan's surliest critics holding their breaths with excitement. He was an earnest-looking, square-faced, 26-year-old Californian, Robert Shaw, and he was conducting a hastily trained chorus of 170-odd singers in a program of modern music by Manhattan's William Schuman...
...critics were excited not so much by Conductor Shaw's musicianship as by the way he held the minutest control over his singers. Gesticulating with feverish intensity, Conductor Shaw suggested a cross between Arturo Toscanini and an overwrought college cheerleader. By the time he had finished, a hand-picked audience agreed that his Collegiate Chorale was one of the finest...
...critics isn't very enlightening. Perhaps, if you read one paper or magazine long enough, you begin to catch on to what is going on and enjoy the fun. As the situation stands now, we have the critics all trying to work up a football-rally attitude toward orchestras, conductors, and even composers. "Time" magazine, for instance, loves to juggle the "Mid-Western league" against the "Eastern league," and play one conductor off against another as if American music were a species of indoor athletics. "Life" recently announced, in its paternal way, that it was becoming "unpatriotic" not to like...
...Conductors Koussevitzky, Beecham and Walter were all in their 60s, and Conductor Toscanini was 75. The directors decided on a younger man, hesitated over the name of Dimitri Mitropoulos, glabrous Greek conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony, and finally gave the job to the less brilliant, much tougher, 49-year-old Rodzinski...
Biggest factor in the choice of Conductor Rodzinski was probably his reputation as an orchestra builder. In ten years he raised the Cleveland Orchestra from a second-rank outfit to one that threatened to take the Midwest championship from the late Frederick Stock's Chicago Symphony. When, in 1937, Arturo Toscanini wanted a man to assemble and weld to gether the NBC Symphony for him, he picked Rodzinski...