In the past 20 years many a young U. S. musician, waiting in the wings for a career, has had an elegant, last-minute, Gallic primping: a summer at Fontainebleau near Paris. Dr. Walter Damrosch started the idea, after running a wartime school in which U. S. bandmasters took a high French polish. The late Composer Camille Saint-Saƫns helped found, and the late Composer Maurice Ravel long figure-headed, Fontainebleau's American Conservatory, for which the French Government made available the Louis XV wing of the old royal palace. As many as 180 students worked with...
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