Silly Conductor Haircuts, aka The Jimmy Levine Award, Part I

Rasori e pettini
Lancette e forbici...

As our dear reader Crew Mantle reminded us yesterday, leadership on the podium often  boils down to this:a good haircut. Opera Chic's idol Riccardo Muti is the perfect example: behold his almost superhuman hairstyle, a monstrously impressive mix of good DNA and obsessive care on the scale of something that centuries ago at the Japanese Imperial Court would have put dozens of indentured servants at work every day for several hours.

Nevertheless, not every conductor is so lucky. And even a genius can have a bad hair day.

Let us examine our first recipient of Opera Chic's Jimmy Levine Award for Silly Conductor Haircuts:

here's Claudio Abbado's Variations On a Beatles Moptop, 1979, Vienna.

Comments

[fignaz]

Levine has a healthy sense of humor about his "do." In an interview once, he referred to it as an "Isro." More recently, I heard him on the radio joking about his thinning hair & how a friend sitting upstairs at the Met ribbed him about being blinded by the reflection off the top of his head.