| | Claudio Abbado -- Encyclopædia Britannica (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-04) |
 | | Italian conductor and music director of the Vienna State Opera (198691) and principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (from 1971), the London Symphony Orchestra (197988), and the Berlin Philharmonic (from 1989). |
 | | In recent years conductors have increasingly become the musical equivalents of professional athletes, parlaying their high-profile public personas and singular skills in a market that is driven by professional excellence and name value. |
 | | He contributed much to the development of what was then a new formoperaand successfully combined the old polyphony with a new emotionalism both in his numerous books of madrigals and in his church... |
| www.britannica.com /eb/article-9003230 (704 words) |