biography
pronunciation:
[toskaneenee]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1867–1957)
|
| biography:
| Conductor, born in Parma, Italy. He was a cellist until the night in 1886 when he took over the baton from an indisposed conductor in Rio de Janeiro and stayed on the podium for the rest of his career. After years of journeyman work in Italian opera houses, he became conductor of Milan's La Scala in 1898. In 1909 he went to the USA to lead the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, and his subsequent career took him to positions in Europe, England, and the USA, including the podium of the New York Philharmonic (1928–36). In 1937 the NBC Symphony, primarily a broadcasting and recording orchestra, was created for Toscanini, and he led it until 1954, cementing his reputation as one of the world's most revered conductors. He helped pioneer a new performance tradition that proclaimed an end to Romantic interpretive excesses and substituted absolute fidelity to the score; in practice, that made for clean, sinewy performances, achieved partly by his legendary tantrums in rehearsals. He was equally admired for his performances of Beethoven and other 19th-c classics, and of modern composers including Stravinsky, Debussy, and Richard Strauss. |
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