“Phenomenally good … Dreisig’s voice [is] youthful yet assured, agile yet fluid, and powerful through its entire range … We can certainly expect much more to come from this singer,” wrote BBC Music Magazine in its five-star review of Miroir(s), Elsa Dreisig’s debut album of operatic arias and scenes. It was subsequently nominated for two top awards, Gramophone and Opus Klassik.
This is the second (and final) bootleg-gone-legit box that was actually sanctioned by Frank Zappa. But rather than go to the expense and time to use better sources – which the artist presumably had access to – he simply ripped off the illicit recordings that had been doing the same to him for decades. And voila, Beat the Boots was born. Zappa enlisted Rhino Records to manufacture and distribute the anthologies – which were packaged to appear as if the contents were being sold in a low budget cardboard box. However once inside Beat the Boots!, Vol. 2 (1992), consumers were treated to a full LP jacket-sized 40-page memorabilia scrapbook, a black felt beret and a red pin/badge bearing the hammer-in-fist artwork emblazoned on it.
Prior to the early Sixties, folk and pop musicians inhabited largely different worlds. There were folk records that had become crossover pop hits, but in essence there was little or no common ground in terms of instrumentation or ideologies. But in the wake of the British beat/R&B boom (or, if you were in America, the British Invasion) and the emergence of Bob Dylan, such barriers were broken down for good. With British acts making music that, for the first time in nascent pop history, matched the quality of their American counterparts, suddenly everything was grist to the mill and musical cross-pollination was almost de rigueur.
“Phenomenally good … Dreisig’s voice [is] youthful yet assured, agile yet fluid, and powerful through its entire range … We can certainly expect much more to come from this singer,” wrote BBC Music Magazine in its five-star review of Miroir(s), Elsa Dreisig’s debut album of operatic arias and scenes. It was subsequently nominated for two top awards, Gramophone and Opus Klassik.
When the New York Philharmonic fired conductor Artur Rodzinski in 1946, Leopold Stokowski saw an opportunity – he had long desired the post of principal conductor in New York and went to work trying to obtain it. From 1947 to 1950, Stokowski made himself available to New York on an on-call basis, conducting children’s concerts, fill in concerts for other conductors, anything that New York would assign to him, remaining visible until the long process of choosing a music director was finished. Alas, it became clear by early 1950 that Stokowski was not going to be New York’s choice for the position, awarded instead to Dimitri Mitropoulos.