Excerpt from the interview appearing in the Koussevitzky Recordings Society newsletter:

Victor Koshkin-Youritzin: I would be intrigued by your comments comparing Stokowski and Toscanini or revealing what people were saying about the two.

Anthony Morss: They universally revered Toscanini. Toscanini was the kind of man who had very, very keen ears, was a good note detective, and insisted on an absolutely scrupulous adherence to the score in most cases. Stokowski was continually rewriting scores, which no doubt was the basis for Toscanini's characterizing Stokowski as an assassino.

Incidentally, Toscanini's assessment of Koussevitzky neatly summed up all the criticism leveled at Koussevitzky over the years, with the grudging admission of his accomplishments. "Such a bad conductor!-(plaintively) and the orchestra plays so well!" I was astonished to learn that Toscanini considered Furtwängler his only genuine rival artistically.

While Stokowski had an incredible ear for tone quality and for which individual musician was playing just how loudly and just how well, in the process of hearing all of this a lot of wrong notes would escape him. In theory, conductors try to hear everything that is going on in the music; in practice, it is not surprising that they hear best those musical elements which are most significant to them personally. I fixed up some confusion of clefs on the bass clarinet in the first rehearsal, very quietly. Also, at one point, Stokowski complained that there was a whole trumpet section that was missing in the parts and that the office should call back to Germany for them. I realized that what he was looking at was a bunch of three differently pitched triangles, and I silently came up beside him and made the sign of the triangle in the score. The orchestra ultimately got wind of that. They were rather disrespectful, and, yet, ultimately they saw Stokowski as such an important conductor that they asked him to become, in effect, the music director of the orchestra, which he was for awhile. He gave them prominence, critical attention and fame-all the things they wanted. He made some recordings with them, too, and they did some marvelous work together. So it was an ambivalent relationship: he was considered something of a musical outlaw, but an enormous talent. And, of course, that's exactly what he was. He was a genius.

VKY: Well, he got extraordinary results with them, and in many ways things that Toscanini never could get or wanted to.

AM: That is right. I knew the work of the NBC Symphony extremely well-as we all did-through their recordings and broadcasts, and also knew that they played with a very polished, rather dry, very clean, scrubbed sound, not at all opulent, but as an extremely fine orchestra. Then to hear Stokowski turn them into the Philadelphia Orchestra with a single gesture of his hand-that was perfectly amazing. It showed, of course, that the orchestra was made up of excellent musicians and would respond to the personality of any strong conductor who was put in front of them. And yet their entire reason for continuing their existence was that in 17 years at NBC, Toscanini had created a tradition which they wished to further; they wished that the tradition not be lost. And here they were working with a man who was of a very different artistic orientation and who could change them instantly into the old, lush Philadelphia Orchestra, eliciting all the wonderful colors that Toscanini, in fact, wasn't interested in.

VKY: How do you think Stokowski actually did that?

AM: He did it exclusively with gesture. It was his personality and the fact that his sound was an emanation not only of who he was, but of also the gestures. When I worked with him, I could see the quality of his hand motions producing tone out of thin air.

VKY: It would have been interesting, perhaps, to film him without sound, almost as a mime.

AM: Fortunately, there are several films of him, especially in Great Conductors of the Past, that wonderful two-hour Teldec video, which shows Stokowski at his most glamorous and also at his most characteristically physical, as far as the conducting gestures were concerned. There was no show: all of the gestures were there for the production of sound. He was a great showman, to be sure, but the gestures were all business, and so, by the way, were his rehearsals. Nobody was ever bored in the Stokowski rehearsals. In the first place, he talked almost not at all, which surprised me extraordinarily. I expected him to talk sound and voluptuousness and string portamentos and all that sort of stuff. Not a word of it. The only technical directions he ever gave, to my knowledge, were to the percussion section. And he was extremely exact about that. He owned a whole lot of exotic percussion instruments himself. He had no hesitation about telling a player that he should warm up the tam-tam before he hit it just to make sure it was vibrating slightly, hit it about two inches below the center, after collapsing the left knee as in a golf swing, and then raise the beater and leave the instrument free to sound. I came to know Stokowski quite well, and at one point I asked, "Maestro, how much do you charge for tam-tam lessons?" He smiled and said, "I am very expensive. Not even Rockefeller can afford me."

Several times I saw him and heard him give exact instructions to various percussion instruments as to exactly where and how to hit. But to the strings, winds, and brass he would do nothing except go back to letter A or letter C, or whatever it was, and then he would work them over with his hands until the sound materialized-the gestures were so specific that you really couldn't do anything but what he wanted. They were amazingly commanding. One of the notable things about his rehearsal technique was that he would say "Letter C" and immediately start to conduct. I have had occasion many times to criticize orchestras for taking too much time to find rehearsal letters. As I have said, when I worked with Stokowski, he just announced the letter, and instantly everybody had to be there.

If they weren't there the first time, boy, were they there the second time. They learned to be as quick as jackrabbits. He saved himself a lot of rehearsal time that way, and he would go back without explaining why he was doing it, because his gestures were so extraordinarily sound-specific and phrasing-specific that unless you were blind and insensitive you just couldn't help but be drawn under the spell of the gestures.

The only other person whom I ever knew who had such incredible physical magnetism in the creation of sound was my own teacher, Leon Barzin. He picked it up from Toscanini, who had an incredibly eloquent stick, though what he asked for was often less than tonally glamorous. The men of the Symphony of the Air, indeed, told me that Toscanini was not interested in tone quality, that he was insistent on intonation, on phrasing and styling, but that he never talked about tone. Actually, I heard him do so once on a rehearsal tape. Stokowski didn't talk about tone either, and he was very much interested in it. He achieved it simply by his gestures.