Abstract

Music

For an audience, watching as opposed to only hearing a musical performance is very much part of the whole experience. What one see can either enhance such qualities as elegance and clarity or it can startlingly dramatize faults inherent in the performance. This is especially true of conductors, at least half of whose effort is bodily gesture as well as baton waving. The author says that he has seen and heard Georg Solti for at least twenty-five years, but it wasn't until his Carnegie Hall appearances February 1993, with the Vienna Philharmonic--in a bewilderingly spotty and even incoherent performance of the Bruckner Eighth Symphony--that the author could at last see how much his gestures and overall podium behavior undermine, and ultimately cripple, the best of his musical intentions.