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Conducting
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===20th century=== Technical standards were brought to new levels by the next generation of conductors, including [[Arthur Nikisch]] (1855–1922) who succeeded Bülow as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1895. Nikisch premiered important works by [[Anton Bruckner]] and [[Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky]], who greatly admired his work; [[Johannes Brahms]], after hearing him conduct his [[Symphony No. 4 (Brahms)|Fourth Symphony]], said it was "quite exemplary, it's impossible to hear it any better." Nikisch took the London Symphony Orchestra on tour through the United States in April 1912, the first American tour by a European orchestra. He made one of the earliest [[Sound recording and reproduction|recordings]] of a complete symphony: the [[Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven)|Beethoven Fifth]] with the Berlin Philharmonic in November 1913. Nikisch was the first conductor to have his art captured on film—alas, silently. The film confirms reports that he made particularly mesmerizing use of eye contact and expression to communicate with an orchestra; such later conductors as [[Fritz Reiner]] stated that this aspect of his technique had a strong influence on their own. Conductors of the generations after Nikisch often left extensive recorded evidence of their arts. Two particularly influential and widely recorded figures are often treated, somewhat inaccurately, as interpretive antipodes. They were the Italian conductor [[Arturo Toscanini]] (1867–1957) and the German conductor [[Wilhelm Furtwängler]] (1886–1954). Toscanini played in orchestras under [[Giuseppe Verdi]] and made his debut conducting ''[[Aida]]'' in 1886, filling in at the last minute for an indisposed conductor. He is to this day regarded by such authorities as [[James Levine]] as the greatest of all Verdi conductors. But Toscanini's repertory was wide, and it was in his interpretations of the German symphonists Beethoven and [[Johannes Brahms|Brahms]] that he was particularly renowned and influential, favoring stricter and faster tempi than a conductor like Bülow or Wagner. Still, his style shows more inflection than his reputation may suggest, and he was particularly gifted at revealing detail and getting orchestras to play in a singing manner. Furtwängler, whom many regard as the greatest interpreter of Wagner (although Toscanini was also admired in this composer) and Bruckner, conducted Beethoven and Brahms with a good deal of inflection of tempo—but generally in a manner that revealed the structure and direction of the music particularly clearly. He was an accomplished composer as well as performer; and he was a disciple of the theorist [[Heinrich Schenker]], who emphasized concern for underlying long-range harmonic tensions and [[Resolution (music)|resolutions]] in a piece, a strength of Furtwängler's conducting. Along with his interest in the large-scale, Furtwängler also shaped the details of the piece in a particularly compelling and expressive manner.[[File:Holland Festival dirigent Leonard Bernstein zal het met het Concertgebouworkes, Bestanddeelnr 933-3400.jpg|thumb|left|[[Leonard Bernstein]] conducting the [[Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra]] in 1985]] The two men had very different techniques: Toscanini's was Italianate, with a long, large baton and clear beats (often not using his left hand); Furtwängler beat time with less apparent precision, because he wanted a more rounded sound (although it is a myth that his technique was vague; many musicians have attested that he was easy to follow in his own way). In any event, their examples illustrate a larger point about conducting technique in the first half of the 20th century: it was not standardized. Great and influential conductors of the middle 20th century like [[Leopold Stokowski]] (1882–1977), [[Otto Klemperer]] (1885–1973), [[Herbert von Karajan]] (1908–1989) and [[Leonard Bernstein]] (1918–1990)—the first American conductor to attain greatness and international fame—had widely varied techniques. Karajan and Bernstein formed another apparent antipode in the 1960s–80s, Karajan as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic (1955–89) and Bernstein as music director of the [[New York Philharmonic]] (1957–69) and later frequent guest conductor in Europe. Karajan's technique was highly controlled, and eventually he conducted with his eyes often closed, as he often memorized scores; Bernstein's technique was demonstrative, with highly expressive facial gestures and hand and body movements; when conducting vocal music, Bernstein would often mouth the words along with the vocalists. Karajan could conduct for hours without moving his feet, while Bernstein was known at times to leap into the air at a great climax. As the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Karajan cultivated warm, blended beauty of tone, which has sometimes been criticized as too uniformly applied; by contrast, in Bernstein's only appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1979—performing Mahler's [[Symphony No. 9 (Mahler)|Symphony No. 9]]—he tried to get the orchestra to produce an "ugly" tone in a certain passage in which he believed it suited the expressive meaning of the music (the first horn player refused and finally agreed to let an understudy play instead of himself). Both Karajan and Bernstein made extensive use of advances in media to convey their art, but in tellingly different ways. Bernstein hosted major prime-time national television series to educate and reach out to children and the public at large about classical music; Karajan made a series of films late in his life, but in them he did not talk. Both made numerous recordings, but their attitudes toward recording differed: Karajan frequently made new studio recordings to take advantage of advances in recording technique, which fascinated him—he played a role in setting the specifications of the compact disc—but Bernstein, in his post-New York days, came to insist on (for the most part) live concert recordings, believing that music-making did not come to life in a studio without an audience. In the last third of the 20th century, conducting technique—particularly with the right hand and the baton—became increasingly standardized. Conductors like [[Willem Mengelberg]] in Amsterdam until the end of World War II had had extensive rehearsal time to mold orchestras very precisely and thus could have idiosyncratic techniques; modern conductors, who spend less time with any given orchestra, must get results with much less rehearsal time. A more standardized technique allows communication to be much more rapid. Nonetheless, conductors' techniques still show a great deal of variety, particularly with the use of the left hand, facial and eye expression, and body language.
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