Robert Commanday, quoted by Janos Gereben, from an interesting extended
discussion of visual aspects of musical performances:

>But, increasingly in this visually-oriented era, many people do go to look
>at the Symphony or this or that recitalist.

I don't think I've ever gone with that reason in mind, and often I don't
even look at the conductor or soloist particularly, but in a few memorable
cases the manner and motions of a musician have riveted my attention in
a way that heightened my awareness of the whole musical event.  I've
mentioned before the way Virgil Fox's excitement whole playing Poulenc was
communicable to the audience at a concert I once attended.  Recently, when
Frederika von Stade sang Chausson's Poeme de l'amour et de la mer with the
Milwaukee Symphony I could not keep my eyes or ears off her, because of the
way she stood, and the simple, unpretentious but assured way she moved her
arms, that seemed to quietly and immediately command attention; this in
addition to the fact that she was splendidly in voice that night, of
course.  The fact that she is still a beautiful woman helped, no doubt.
The performance was wonderful.

Years ago, I think the season before he went to Los Angeles, Giulini
and the Chicago Symphony gave the finest performance of the Eroica I've
ever heard.  My visual memory of that concert was the astoundlingly fluid
and expressive motions with which Giulini's left hand shaped the music.
For me, there was definitely a connection between the visual and the
aural which heightened my attention to the music.  Last year I experienced
a delayed echo of this memorable concert.  At an open rehearsal of a
university symphony concert some preschool children were in attendance
and being very physically expressive in their responses to the music.  One
little girl was mimicking the left hand gestures of the conductor--in a way
that moved me to mention to the conductor afterwards that not only was she
creating an audience for classical music but that there was a little girl
in purple who was going to be a conductor when she grew up.  I was at least
half serious.

Jim Tobin