“Danny Kaye in a high key”
The Sydney Morning Herald – July 28, 1975
By: Roger Covell

No, Danny Kaye does not simply mime while the orchestra goes its own way and, yes, the orchestral musicians do follow his beat.

           On the evidence of his clear directions and strong sense of rhythm, his excellent musical memory and his determination to get his own way—evidence confirmed at his benefit concert appearance with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the Opera House on Saturday night—no reasonable listener could doubt that Mr. Kaye might very well have had a flourishing career as a conductor if fortune had led him that way.

           He would certainly have known how to make entrances with even more panache and bonhomie than Leonard Bernstein, whose mannerisms (and those of some other conductors) he deliciously parodied. He might have gone on as long as the nonagenarian Leopold Stokowski, whose present-day geriatric progress to the podium he turned into a magnificently sustained sequence of silent comedy.

           He provided even more convincing evidence of his ability to get his own way musically in the way he genially bullied various sections of the audience into providing choral sound effects for him, including an imitation of the stiffly bobbing bassoon figure at the beginning of the Chinese Dance in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker music.

           He employed his own celebrated facility with double-jointed vocables in partnering the SSO trumpeters in brilliant variations on the Carnival of Venice, conducted the Flight of the Bumble Bee with a plastic swat, rebuked latecomers and brought them up to date on the state of the evening (including a lightning reminiscence of the Fledermaus Overture, directed by Willem van Otterloo, the SSO’s resident conductor, at the beginning of the program).

           He gave a demonstration of the coffee-grinder school of conducting, talked sentimentally and reminiscently, inquired of “Willie” (van Otterloo) how he thought his players were doing and took advantage of Donald Hazelwood’s pronounced histrionic flair by acting out the kind of fantasy that has occurred to many an orchestral player. It ended with an offstage confrontation between conductor and leader, two loud revolver shots and the victorious return of Hazelwood.

           There was more, much more, including a wicked improvisation of the more faceless kinds of contemporary orchestral music and a baffled attempt to beat the vehement repetitions of the end of Beethoven’s Fifth; some of it was low-keyed, some of it farcical, all of it was on the side of music.

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