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-Phoenix – Mar. 11, 1958

           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-high prices to attend the venerable orchestra’s annual pension-fund concert.
            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.

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