Word: conductor
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This week the Philharmonic, under gangling, Dalmatian-born Artur Rodzinski, celebrated its 100th anniversary with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Weber's Oberon Overture, Ureli Corelli Hill would hardly have recognized his orchestra. Its budget had grown to $750,000 a year. Its chief conductors rated salaries of $50,000 a season and up. Oldest symphony orchestra in the U.S., third oldest in the world,† the Philharmonic was now the patriarch of some 225 other U.S. orchestras. So stable a feature of Manhattan had the Philharmonic become that only twice in a century had its concerts been...
Ever since it was founded in 1881 by aristocratic, union-hating Major Henry Lee Higginson, the Boston Symphony had rebuffed all efforts at unionization. A strike over the issue in 1920 was quelled by the management at great expense to U.S. symphonic music when some 31 strikers left. Conductor Koussevitzky managed to rebuild the orchestra to the highest level. Two years ago Boss Petrillo barred the Bostonians from radio and recording studios under a threat to pull all union musicians out of the studios. Like most U.S. symphony orchestras, the Bostonians had come to depend less and less on wealthy...
...spite of the triteness of the subject, the picture is not without its good points. The pranks of Alan Hale and Ronald Reagan are good for an occasional laugh, and the antics of a certain conductor who kicks them off a train are worth at least fifty-five cents...
...late John Philip Sousa did it with bombs and giant firecrackers. His predecessor, redoubtable Bandmaster Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, cracked plaster from the ceiling of many a U.S. auditorium with a battery of real cannon manned by a squad of U.S. artillerymen. In Madison Square Garden, six years ago, Conductor Erno Rapee added a squad of infantry and a ten-gauge cannon to his WPA orchestra of 210 men, made enough noise to rock midtown Manhattan...
...this roused the envy of St. Louis' Conductor Vladimir Golschmahn. Promising in his program that he would perform the overture so stirringly that the audience would "literally be lifted from their seats," Conductor Golschmann ransacked nearby army camps for artillery. He found plenty of cannon, but no blank shells. At last Conductor Golschmann settled for a couple of shotguns which he borrowed from the Schubert Theater's property manager, Eugene Popp. They were "fired by stage mechanics into empty wooden tubs. St. Louis Symphony patrons agreed that the popping of Popp's shotguns was noise enough...