Stokowski Rehearsal - Barber ’Adagio for Strings’

in 1968, Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra, which he had founded six years earlier, gave the opening concert of the Madison Square Gardens new building in New York City. Cameras were on hand to film one of the rehearsals and we see Stokowski exhorting his players to give him more tone (“piu, piu“) in the celebrated Barber ’Adagio for Strings.’ He was alone among the great conductors of the past who insisted on “free bowing“ in the string sections, so that the players’ up and down bows sh