Word: orchestra
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Bonanza. In Vienna, with $4,000 inherited from an uncle, Landon arranged for the recording of four rarely heard Haydn symphonies by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, led by young U.S. Conductor Jonathan Sternberg. Then he hit a bonanza; he persuaded a friend to invest $13,000 in the Haydn Society, assuring him it would "pyramid faster than Florida real estate." With his bonanza money, he hired a photographer and a musicologist, sent them up & down Austria, Germany and Hungary collecting and microfilming Haydn manuscripts. He also recorded the Nelson Mass, which sold 5,000 copies, put the society...
Unlike Gluck's Orfeo, Haydn's opera has an unhappy ending: Orfeo's beautiful singing is not enough to bring his Eurydice back from the dead; Orfeo himself is poisoned by the Bacchae. Enthusiastic Robbins Landon, who recorded Orfeo with singers, chorus and orchestra (cut to a Haydn-prescribed 40 pieces) of the Vienna State Opera, was ready to predict that "it will hold its own alongside [Mozart's] Don Giovanni. We don't believe in resuscitating something from the dead unless it's really a killer. And this...
Died. Max Reiter, 45, Jewish refugee, from Italian Fascism, who in 1938 left a successful career as conductor on the Continent (Berlin, Munich, Rome, Milan), came to the U.S. with only $40, within five years shaped the San Antonio Symphony into a major orchestra; of a heart attack; in San Antonio...
...Bruno Quirinetta is an Italian Bing Crosby, Phil Harris and Spike Jones all rolled into one. Recording with his seven-piece Orchestra Quirinetta, he is one of Italy's biggest-selling popular artists. Wherever he plays at fashionable clubs in Rome, Milan, Florence or Rapallo, Italians surrender in droves to his particular brand of gaiety-an infectious mixture of nonsense and nostalgia...
...singing gondolier in his native Venice. After four years of that, and a few handsome and encouraging tips, he decided he could do as well or better just singing and entertaining without straining his back in the bargain. During the war he had to give up his orchestra ("Italians were too depressed to enjoy cheerful dance music"), eked out a living by trading on the black market. But since then Bruno, who changed his name from Baldini to Quirinetta after making his first big hit in Rome's Quirinetta nightclub, has become roughly as popular as ravioli...