Bernard Chasan, ominously:

>I have a filling which picks up psychic signals from Neptune, and THEY
>say: Robert Spano. And just the other day I consulted the Delphic Oracle
>(I happened to be in the neighborhood) and IT said: Listen to sounds
>from Brooklyn - obscure, but not too hard for experts to decode....

The stuff about Neptune I accept as a true story, but with a respectful
duck and a reverent wing methinks that Bernard Chasan might have misread
the Delphic Oracle.  The only Brooklyner of the sort of esteem worthy
of the sacred serpent and of Apollo is, indubitably, Leo Durocher (Walt
Whitman went to school in Brooklyn,but....).  Of course, Durocher's long
dead, but it's HIS kind, I am sure, that the Oracle was asking us to
anticipate.  The kind of conductor of men who could cope the big problems
and with happenstance:  what to do when the basses are loaded; when the
concert master quits in a pet just before the command performance, whom
to put on first; how to work a glissando into thoid; that sort of thing.
These questions weighed, I tend to side with Roger Hecht, a sound musician,
who intuits Abbado.  A speculation, I daresay, which though it lacks the
Delphic cachet, is by no means from Claudio Nine!

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]