New York Philharmonic
“Music Is Given a Real Beating by Danny Kaye”
The Milwaukee Journal – Mar. 11, 1958
New York, N.Y. – AP – Maestro Danny Kaye “conducted” at Carnegie hall
Monday night. Although art suffered, the New York philharmonic pension fund benefited.
And everybody had a good time. Danny loped on stage carrying a dozen batons.
He shook hands with the concertmaster and a dozen other men in the 100 member orchestra.
After
wending his way through the ensemble, he reached the two female harpists and gave
each a kiss. Then—as if overcome with emotion—he planted a kiss on the brow of a
male bass fiddle player. Finally reaching the podium, Danny handed out
batons to orchestra members like noisemakers at a New Year’s eve party. He fell off
the podium. He wound up for his first downbeat, and the baton flew into the audience.
Danny
gave his cues to the musicians by kicking out his foot, sticking out his tongue,
shouting “gaboom,” barking like a seal when he was pleased, and giggling at every
pleasant sound.
The men got into the spirit of things so thoroughly that
they began to make musical madness of their own and turned out some of the season’s
choicest cacophony.
“Philharmonic Musical Hysterics Under Guidance of Danny Kaye”
Saskatoon Star-
NEW YORK (AP) – A player in the New York Philharmonic was ordered off
the stage of Carnegie Hall Monday night for laughing out loud at the guest conductor.
The
unprecedented incident occurred before an elite and dressy audience that had paid
extra-
The
guest conductor led a respectable program of Rossini, Wagner, Strauss, Tchaikovsky
and the like. But from his first appearance he broke away from tradition, convention
and indeed even the proprieties, shaking hands not only with the concert master but
with a dozen other players before he ventured on the podium, and even giving a kiss
to each of the two beautiful harpists.
He stumbled onto the podium, and
fell off. He lost hold of a baton and sent it winging over the heads of the paying
customers behind him. Once he kept on conducting with a mad, swinging beat for several
measures after the music had ended and the orchestra had become silent.
It
was Danny Kaye, borrowed from theatre, radio and films, not so much leading an orchestra
as putting on a circus. The man commanded to quit the stage didn’t quit, but he was
laughing too hard to pucker his lips to play and the audience didn’t just laugh,
it roared.
Kaye conduced with a swishing of his hips and a jiggling of
his legs; sand for the boys, who in one number sang for him; put on a Spanish dance
while he led Carmen; and conducted a few passages with the breast stroke and the
crawl.
Perhaps his best stunt was to lament with the audience that they
never saw anything of a conductor but his back, and to show them what it was like
from the other side, facing them—for a “Lohengrin” prelude—and registering snarls,
weeping, laughing, ecstasy and anguish and even doubling up his fists for a fight.
The
orchestra played admirably but seemed to have spent more time rehearsing stunts than
music.