The concertmaster and first-chair violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra for decades, he took part in a diplomatic breakthrough in 1973 with concerts in Mao Zedong’s Beijing.
Norman Carol, a former violin prodigy who was first chair and concertmaster for the acclaimed Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly three decades, accompanying it on a history-making trip to China under Mao Zedong in 1973, died on April 28. He was 95.
His death, at an assisted living center in Bala Cynwyd, a community on Philadelphia’s Main Line, was announced in a statement posted on social media by the orchestra. It was not widely reported outside the classical music world at the time.
As concertmaster, tuning the orchestra and overseeing the string section, Mr. Carol served under the celebrated conductors Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Muti and Wolfgang Sawallisch.
“He was dashing, comfortable, even swashbuckling as a leader,” Paul Arnold, a violinist with the orchestra, said in the statement. “His playing was bold, expressive and hall-filling.” Mr. Carol “went on to personally embody the ‘Philadelphia Sound,’” he added.
That fabled sound, which emerged under Leopold Stokowski and took shape under Ormandy, the orchestra’s longtime music director starting in the 1930s, is built on “distinctive honeyed timbre” emanating from its strings, as the journal Classical Voice North America noted in 2015, along with softer attacks from the brass section and a more blended percussion approach.
The orchestra’s sound became known around the world in tours of Europe and Asia during Mr. Carol’s tenure.
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Source: Music - nytimes.com
