Word: conductor
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Adolescents who are yanked off to symphony concerts by culture-maddened parents often conceive a permanent dislike for symphonic music. Symphony boards of directors have long wondered how to make these adolescents take it and like it. Six years ago, Philadelphia's platinum-blond Conductor Leopold Stokowski suggested a solution: make the parents stay away. Thereupon he started a series of "Concerts for Youth," sold tickets to youth only (between 13 and 25), got "bouncers" to patrol the aisles of the staid Academy of Music with orders to throw out anyone who looked overage...
...carefully selected audience Conductor Stokowski played full-weight symphonic programs. But he punctuated them with speeches, quips, unprogrammed surprises. He held conversations with them across the footlights, let them wriggle, whistle, cheer, shout, sing, throw paper darts. Once, when they dared him to, he brought down the wrath of Philadelphia's Tories by playing the Internationale. Stokowski's Youth Concerts became the most jam-packed events of the Philadelphia Orchestra's season. Optimistic highbrows felt that a sizable percentage of Philadelphia's jitterbugs had been saved for Beethoven...
Last week Conductor Stokowski, back in Philadelphia on a return engagement, rounded out the sixth season of Philadelphia's Youth Concerts. Three thousand youngsters crammed the aged Academy of Music. (This season's tickets were all sold out two hours after they were placed on sale.) As a special treat Stokowski gave them a world premiere: Alexander Gretchaninoff's Fifth Symphony. Then, as one adolescent, the whole audience sang Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, Schubert's Ave Maria and a brand-new Philadelphia Youth Song to music by Sibelius. Maestro Stokowski called for more...
...Last week John Barbirolli, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, who is not generally considered a magician so far as programs are concerned, pulled an exciting Easter rabbit out of his hat. Assisted by the young, well-trained Westminster Choir of Princeton, N. J., the Philharmonic gave Manhattan an earful of Gioachino Antonio Rossini's rare Petite Messe Solennelle (Little Solemn Mass), which is neither little nor solemn. The Mass took almost two hours to perform, was full of the impish but not impious gaiety of Rossini's comic operas (Ceneventola, The Barber of Seville). Rossini...
...irascible Bernard De Voto stepped up. Two years later De Voto turned over direction to young, good-natured George Stevens. Last week another shake-up left The Saturday Review with the same editors but new owners. Purchaser was tall, hard-working Joseph Hilton Smyth, onetime pulp editor, conductor of a mimeographed sheet analyzing foreign affairs, who in the last year has taken over Current History and two venerable, distinguished magazines: Living Age (founded in 1844), North American Review (1815). Associated with him is Publisher Harrison Smith. Owners Smyth & Smith announced there would be no change in The Saturday Review...