A number of Conductors, 2023

This Week in Classical Music: September 18, 2023.  A number of conductors.  We missed numerous anniversaries whereas exploring the music of the transitional interval between the Renaissance and early Baroque.  In the present day we’ll get again to a gaggle of conductors.  First, Karl Böhm, probably the most profitable of them.  Böhm was born on August 28^th of 1894 in Graz, Austria.  His profession took off within the Twenties, with some assist from Bruno Walter; in 1927 Böhm was appointed the chief musical director in Darmstadt, and in 1931 he took the identical place on the prestigious Hamburg Opera.  In 1933 the Nazis got here to energy in Germany and Böhm took over the Dresden Semper Opera, after Fritz Busch, the earlier director, went into exile.  Böhm was a pal of Richard Strauss and carried out a number of premiers of his operas.  In 1938 Böhm appeared on the Salzburg Competition, and in 1943 took over the well-known Vienna opera.  For a few years Böhm was a Nazi sympathizer, although by no means a member of the NSDAP; after the struggle, he went by means of a two-year denazification interval, after which his profession took off once more.  He continued his engagements with Vienna and Dresden, carried out in South America, and made a really profitable New York debut in 1957.  He continuously led the Metropolitan, premiering operas by Berg and Strauss and efficiently conducting lots of Wagner’s operas (Birgit Nilsson debuted underneath Böhm’s baton).  Böhm’s remaining engagements have been in London, at Covent Backyard and with the London Symphony.  He died on August 14^th of 1981, two weeks shy of his 87^th birthday.

Right here is Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), a tone poem from 1898.  Karl Böhm conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.  This recording was made in 1976.  Additionally, fairly not too long ago we got here throughout a DW documentary from 2022 known as Music in Nazi Germany: The Maestro and the Cellist of Auschwitz (right here).  It’s very a lot price watching.  The maestro in query shouldn’t be Karl Böhm however Wilhelm Furtwängler, eight years older than Böhm and extra established.  Nonetheless, a lot of what’s stated within the documentary about Furtwängler applies to Böhm (we expect that to an excellent increased diploma).  A observe: the “kapellmeister” of the Auschwitz ladies’s orchestra, Alma Rosé, talked about within the documentary, died there in April of 1944.  Alma was the daughter of Arnold Rosé, the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic for 50 years and the chief of the well-known Rosé Quartet.  Alma’s mom was Gustav Mahler’s sister. 

We talked about Bruno Walter’s title above; he additionally occurs to be one of many conductors we needed to jot down about.  Walter was born on September 15^th of 1876 in Berlin.  We celebrated him a number of years in the past right here.  At the least as proficient as Böhm, his life couldn’t have been extra completely different.  Walter was Jewish, for a few years he collaborated intently with Mahler and, in 1912, led the posthumous premier efficiency of the composer’s Ninth Symphony.  He was the music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the place he carried out most of Wagner’s operas.  Walter escaped from Germany in 1933 (on the time he was the principal conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra).  After working in Europe, he moved to the US in 1939 and settled in Beverly Hills, the realm that hosted a big German expat neighborhood.  Within the US, he labored with many orchestras, together with the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.  Bruno Walter was 85 when he died in 1962.  Right here Bruno Walter is taking part in the piano and conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20.  This can be a stay recording made on November 3^rd of 1939.

Simply to checklist different conductors in our group: István Kertész (b. August 28, 1929); three conductors, born on September 1: Tullio Serafin (in 1878), Leonard Slatkin (in 1944), Seiji Ozawa, (in 1935).  Christoph von Dohnányi was born on September 8, 1929, and Christopher Hogwood, on September 10, 1941.