Unsightly Sommerfest Longtime lovers of the Minnesota Orchestra's Sommerfest may want to find a place on their summer-reading lists for Leonard Slatkin's "Conducting Business: Unveiling the Mystery Behind the Maestro." He was the founder and maestro of the festival for its first decade. And his recollections of those early days, though compressed into three pages, are vivid. "Who could ever forget the sight of 10 pianists pounding out 'Ride of the Valkyries,'" Slatkin writes, "as a pair of ladies decked out in horned helmets and dirndls pranced down the aisle? Not to mention the stagehands who tossed a football around onstage during this spectacle?" The...
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