Boris Goldovsky (Борис Анисимович Голдовский; June 7, 1908 - February 15, 2001) was a Russian-born conductor and broadcast commentator, active in the United States.
According to U.S. immigration records, he was inspected and detained at Ellis Island twice: once in October 1925 for an irregularity with his visa and once in late July 1932 on suspicion that he might be an illegally contracted labourer; both situations were rather quickly resolved and he was permitted to continue by rail to Pennsylvania.
The same year, he was named director of the opera department at the Tanglewood Music Center in the Berkshires by Serge Koussevitsky, a position he held through 1962.
[3] The operation became independent and moved to New York in the 1950s and enjoyed four decades of touring during which young singers were trained for operatic careers.
Invited by his former student Beaman Griffin, he was joined by his friends Richard Crittenden and Arthur Schoep.
His encyclopedic knowledge led Texaco to offer him a weekend job as master of ceremonies covering the intermission periods of the Texaco-sponsored Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.
He quickly became known across the United States for his Saturday radio commentary and earned the nickname of "Mr.
Famous associates include Mario Lanza, Leonard Bernstein and Mary Beth Peil.
Experienced sight-readers were automatically inferring the missing sharp symbol, and so failing to see the error in the printed score.
The production mechanism involved typewriters and photocopy machines: preserving enough of the score to present the vocal lines with space between systems to clarify stage directions.
Stage directors had their individual touches (“dirty thumbprints” was one fond description), and there would be lively discussions on exactly which detail was preferable.
However discreetly they were handled, they are clearly the result of substantial labor: after defining precise stage directions, they required photocopying the piano-vocal scores, cutting the copies into systems, pasting them onto typewritten pages with the instructions interposed, and finally, copied again.