Documentary sketch of Antonia Brico, who won acclaim first in the Twenties as an orchestral conductor -- in Berlin, London, New York -- and for a while was able to ride on the novelty of breaking through the sex barrier in the conducting profession; once the novelty began wearing thin, the top conducting jobs became harder to come by; and in the late Forties she settled in Denver, where, into her seventies, she continues to teach music and infrequently to conduct. Her life story might have provided a suitable model for a novel by Willa Cather, owing to her frontier spirit and fortitude, her feelings of being passed by and falling short, and of course her music. The hour-long film, by Judy Collins and Jill Godmilow, is made up mainly of the woman's informal reminiscences at the kitchen table or in the living room; it admits us also to rehearsals and music classes and -- a marvelous scene -- backstage at the debut of one of her prize piano students, age sixteen; and it judiciously inserts images of mementoes, musical scores, and idolized composers of the past, as if to give us glimpses of the phantom inspirations that must inhabit the brain of any aspirant musician. (1974) — Duncan Shepherd
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