Kevin Sutton writes:

>...Lorin Maazel or Seiji Ozawa, who have photographic memories and who
>not only perform sans score, they rehearse without one too!

So did Sergiu Celibidache.  The trouble there was that during rehearsals
Celi had the habit of stopping the band whenever anything went wrong.  He
then explained what he wanted fixed, before calling for a repeat.  Because
Celi could/would not memorize bar numbers, it fell to the concert master to
divine the spot where Celi might want the reprise to start and bawl out the
apprproriate bar number.  Not seldom, trying to that took so long that
other members of the orchestra started volunteering suggestions and a
period of low-intensity chaos ensued.  Celi might have avoided this by
bringing along a score--like Ivan Fischer.  I recently experienced him
conducting the Munich Philharmonic in rehearsal.  He did it from memory,
but had a score in front of him for the purposes of post-mortems and
reprises.

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]