Word: conductor
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...Century, Cyrano de Bergerac. Its better-than-average libretto was blank-versified out of Edmond Rostand's play by the late William J. Henderson, musicritic of the New York Sun. Its workmanlike score was put together, out of a wide knowledge of Wagner and other masters, by a conductor who had been toonering along since 1885 -Walter Damrosch. Cyrano de Bergerac had five performances, was then forgotten by most people. But not by Conductor Damrosch...
Last week white-haired, cherubicund Dr. Damrosch lovingly conducted a new version of Cyrano, which he had polished up during the past three years. The opera was given in concert form in Carnegie Hall, with soloists and full orchestra. The long performance gave Conductor Damrosch perceptible pleasure: it was practically a celebration of his 79th birthday, just past. Next day the critics behaved like good children. Nearest to the mark (that Cyrano was appallingly dull) was Edward O'Gorman of the Post: ". . . a score . . . that the average listener might not journey far to hear, but one that he would...
...entering his 80th year, Walter Damrosch had better to boast of than his operas (he wrote three others, The Scarlet Letter, The Dove of Peace, The Man Without a Country). No man living has one more for good music in the U. S. than he. Born of a famed conductor father (Leopold Damrosch) in Breslau, Germany, Walter Damrosch took his own opera company barnstorming in the U. S., toured with the old New York Symphony to towns which had never heard a concert. Shrewd, levelheaded, anything but temperamental, he could take it in his stride when a snow-heavy trap...
...Isolde one night last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. This popular team had impersonated Wagner's potion-bibbing lovers many a time before. But this time Tristan was an event. In the pit was the Met's first U. S.-born, U. S.-trained conductor, sandy-haired, bespectacled Edwin McArthur...
...time, cigar-smoking (box-a-day) McArthur studied orchestra scores, practiced waving a stick before a mirror. An ear-splitting singer, he made his wife, his onetime singing pupil Blanche Victoria Pope, his stand-in vocalist in his studies. Flagstad plugged him as a conductor (TIME, Feb. 5, 1940). The San Francisco and Chicago operas hired Conductor McArthur; last year the Met unbent and let him do a Tristan in a post-season visiting performance in Boston. But not until last week did the Met let him play in its own back yard. Critics gave Edwin McArthur top marks...