Word: conductor
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Last week in Philadelphia, Violinist Krasner and white-haired Conductor Leopold Stokowski's Philadelphia Orchestra gave Schönberg's Violin Concerto its first public hearing. While the aged Academy of Music's Friday-afternoon audience sat quietly from force of habit, Louis Krasner fiddled so hard he nearly dropped his bow. The bewildered audience couldn't tell whether all of Schönberg's "unplayable" notes were being played or not. When it was over, the orchestra looked embarrassed, the audience, impressed by an obvious feat of strength and skill, drowned...
...Next day, after a repeat performance had drawn titters, hisses and shouts, Conductor Stokowski turned and gently chided the audience: "We don't ask you to like this music or to dislike it, but to give it a fair chance. I would like to thank those who received Schönberg with an open mind. They are in the majority. . . . The others, well, they can't help it. And perhaps," added Stokowski amid more titters, "they are right...
...years ago, when famed Maestro Arturo Toscanini held a whip hand over it, the spirited, self-willed New York Philharmonic-Symphony was probably the greatest orchestra in the world. Its master horn and oboe soloists, its violin virtuosi had matched egos with dozens of great conductors, were so finely trained that only the hot lashes of the little Maestro could hold them in line. When in 1936 Maestro Toscanini stepped down from the Philharmonic's podium,* the Philharmonic's board of directors were hard put to find a new conductor sufficiently tough to take his place. After some...
Meanwhile, in the Middle West, white-haired Frederick Stock had been conducting the Chicago Symphony orchestra in the same methodical way for 35 years. Conductor Stock had never tried to create sensations, never toured Europe or South America, never made movies or interested himself in international politics. He had stuck in his own Chicago back yard for so long that music-lovers in big Eastern cities nearly forgot about him, certainly never mentioned his orchestra in the same breath with Toscanini's. But Conductor Stock stuck to his knitting, and the Chicago Symphony stuck to Conductor Stock. Its strings...
Eugene Ormandy is regular conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and last month signed a new five-year contract with it. But Leopold Stokowski is still its occasional conductor. Last week he was in Philadelphia for one of his brief stints on the podium. As always, he made news...