Jose Serebrier shares his recollections of Leopold Stokowski with Simon Callow
Stokowski built an aura of fake mysticism around himself, replacing his English accent with an Eastern European one, but he had a true mystical quality, too. He could bring out a certain orchestral glow even in his later years that has never been matched. In this interview, the composer Serebrier talks about Stokowski's amazing hand technique that replaced didactic speeches. For formalists, he also mentions that Stokowski eventually treated every piece like a tone poem and carefully timed the silence between movements.