Technology And Health Man And His World

One of the greatest opera and concert directors of all time, Arturo Toscanini was internationally known for his forcefulness and style of conducting, which led to near-perfection in his work. He was, from the opening of the 20th century until his retirement in the '50s, the most prominent orchestra conductor in the world, his only peer being his longtime rival, Wilhelm Furtwangler. Born in Parma, Italy, in 1867, Toscanini began training at the Parma Conservatory when he was nine-years-old. There he studied the cello and musical composition.

The last days of the American icon Walt Disney form a powerful and poignant subject for Philip Glass's latest opera, which was filmed at its first performances in Madrid in January 2013. Phelim McDermott's spectacular production is worthy of Disney's own visual imagination and its definitive influence on American culture, while in the pit is the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, an experienced and authoritative champion of the composer's hypnotically beautiful music, which gives wings to Rudy Wurlitzer's operatic transformation of Peter Stephan Jungk's novel, using both fact and fiction to peer into Disney's troubled psyche as illness forces him to confront his mortality.