Opera Chic

Silly Conductor Haircuts Part III: Sergiu Celibidache

Here's back our "Silly Conductor Haircuts" series, beloved by readers: this week we give the Bad Hair Bear Award, aka The Jimmy Levine, to our awesome Romanian genius (no, not Angela Gheorghiu), the late Sergiu Celibidache.

The only thing scarier than the Zen, bada$$ maestro's outbursts of pure gleeful anger at his orchestra or his unhappy students was the long-in-the-back super-slicked style he sported well into his early Seventies (he passed away at 84 in 1996, and in his last years he had mercifully cut the long-flowing Brylcreem curls from his genius nape). In the picture above here's his "I'm Dripping So Much Whale Oil My Jacket Is All Sticky Now" hairstyle, Tokyo 1980.

Silly Conductor Haircuts, Aka The Jimmy Levine Award: Part II

A couple weeks ago, Opera Chic has awarded the first Levine Award for the wackiest conductor hairstyle to Claudio Abbado's cute 1970s moptop.

This week, we honor the super-cool Vladimir Ashkenazy: in these vidcaps (bad, I know, I totally win the Zapruder Award for suckiest shakiest handheld video ev4r) from a 1960s London concert he sports a truly awesome, savage, uncontrollable cowlick on the back of his skull.

Because, we assume, in the 1960s for the kewl kidz combs were clearly something only  Lusers used, with a capital "L". All those notes flying off of one's brainium cavity apparently have an adverse effect to one's hair, at least according to the Russian-born maestro. Or maybe he had already traveled to Iceland and his hair was just frozen like that. Anyway, we dig. Jimmy "Hair Bear" Levine would love it.

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.