Georg Solti

Georg Solti a adăugat o fotografie

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Georg

Sir Georg Solti ( jorj SHOL-tee, Hungarian: [ˈʃolti]; born György Stern; 21 October 1912 – 5 September 1997) was a Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor, known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt, and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Born in Budapest, he studied there with Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner, and Ernő Dohnányi. In the 1930s, he was a répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera and worked at the Salzburg Festival for Arturo Toscanini. His career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazis' influence on Hungarian politics, and being Jewish, he fled the increasingly harsh Hungarian anti-Jewish laws in 1938. After conducting a season of Russian ballet in London at the Royal Opera House, he found refuge in Switzerland, where he remained during the Second World War. Prohibited from conducting there, he earned a living as a pianist. After the war, Solti was appointed musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946. In 1952, he moved to the Oper Frankfurt, where he remained in charge for nine years. He took West German citizenship in 1953. In 1961, he became musical director of the Covent Garden Opera Company,…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a adăugat o fotografie

acum 6 zile

R.I.P
Georg

Early years Solti was born György Stern on Maros utca, in the Hegyvidék district of the Buda side of Budapest. He was the younger of the two children of Teréz (née Rosenbaum) and Móricz "Mór" Stern, both of whom were Jewish. In the aftermath of the First World War it became the accepted practice in Hungary for citizens with Germanic surnames to adopt Hungarian ones. The territorial revisionist regime of Admiral Horthy enacted a series of Hungarianisation laws, including a requirement that state employees with foreign-sounding names must change them. Mór Stern, a self-employed merchant, felt no need to change his surname, but thought it prudent to change that of his children. He renamed them after Solt, a small town in central Hungary. His son's given name, György, was acceptably Hungarian and was not changed. Solti described his father as "a kind, sweet man who trusted everyone. He shouldn't have, but he did. Jews in Hungary were tremendously patriotic. In 1914, when war broke out, my father invested most of his money in a war loan to help the country. By the time the bonds matured, they were worthless." Mór Stern was a religious man, but his son was less…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a adăugat o fotografie

acum 6 zile

R.I.P
Georg

Pianist and conductor After graduating from the academy in 1930, Solti was appointed to the staff of the Hungarian State Opera. He found that working as a répétiteur, coaching singers in their roles and playing at rehearsals, was a more fruitful preparation than Unger's classes for his intended career as a conductor. In 1932, he went to Karlsruhe in Germany as assistant to Josef Krips, but within a year, Krips, anticipating the imminent rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, insisted that Solti should go home to Budapest, where at that time Jews were not in danger. Other Jewish and anti-Nazi musicians also left Germany for Budapest. Among other musical exiles with whom Solti worked there were Otto Klemperer, Fritz Busch, and Kleiber. Before Austria fell under Nazi control, Solti was assistant to Arturo Toscanini at the 1937 Salzburg Festival: Toscanini was the first great musical impression in my life. Before I heard him live in 1936, I had never heard a great opera conductor, not in Budapest, and it was like a lightning flash. I heard his Falstaff in 1936 and the impact was unbelievable. It was the first time I heard an ensemble singing absolutely precisely. It…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a adăugat o fotografie

acum 6 zile

R.I.P
Georg

Munich and Frankfurt With the end of the war, Solti's luck changed dramatically. He was appointed musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946. In normal circumstances, this prestigious post would have been an unthinkable appointment for a young and inexperienced conductor, but the leading German conductors such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Clemens Krauss, and Herbert von Karajan were prohibited from conducting pending the conclusion of denazification proceedings against them. Under Solti's direction, the company rebuilt its repertoire and began to recover its prewar eminence. He benefited from the encouragement of the elderly Richard Strauss, in whose presence he conducted Der Rosenkavalier. Strauss was reluctant to discuss his own music with Solti, but gave him advice about conducting. In addition to the Munich appointment, Solti gained a recording contract in 1946. He signed for Decca Records, not as a conductor, but as a piano accompanist. He made his first recording in 1947, playing Brahms's First Violin Sonata with violinist Georg Kulenkampff. He was insistent that he wanted to conduct, and Decca gave him his first recording sessions as a conductor later in the same year, with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra in Beethoven's Egmont overture. Twenty years later, Solti…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a adăugat o fotografie

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R.I.P
Georg

Covent Garden In 1960, Solti signed a three-year contract to be music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1962. Even before he took the post, the philharmonic's autocratic president, Dorothy Chandler, breached his contract by appointing a deputy music director without Solti's approval. Although he admired the chosen deputy, Zubin Mehta, Solti felt he could not have his authority undermined from the outset, and he withdrew from his appointment. He accepted an offer to become musical director of Covent Garden Opera Company, London. When first sounded out about the post, he had declined it. After 14 years of experience at Munich and Frankfurt, he was uncertain that he wanted a third successive operatic post. Moreover, founded only 15 years earlier, the Covent Garden company was not yet the equal of the best opera houses in Europe. Bruno Walter convinced Solti that it was his duty to take on Covent Garden. Biographer Montague Haltrecht suggests that Solti seized the breach of his Los Angeles contract as a convenient pretext to abandon the philharmonic in favour of Covent Garden. In his memoirs, though, Solti wrote that he wanted the Los Angeles position very much indeed. He originally considered holding both posts…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a lăsat un gând

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Chicago Symphony Orchestra In 1967, Solti was invited to become music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was the second time he had been offered the post. The first had been in 1963 after the death of the orchestra's conductor, Fritz Reiner, who made its reputation in the previous decade. Solti told the representatives of the orchestra that his commitments at Covent Garden made it impossible to give Chicago the eight months a year they sought. He suggested giving them three and a half months a year and inviting Carlo Maria Giulini to take charge for a similar length of time. The orchestra declined to proceed on these lines. When Solti accepted the orchestra's second invitation, they agreed that Giulini should be appointed to share the conducting. Both conductors signed three-year contracts with the orchestra, effective from 1969. One of the members of the Chicago Symphony described it to Solti as "the best provincial orchestra in the world." Many players remained from its celebrated decade under Reiner, but morale was low, and the orchestra was $5M in debt. Solti concluded that raising the orchestra's international profile was essential. He ensured that it was engaged for many of his Decca…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a lăsat un gând

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Later years In addition to his tenure in Chicago, Solti was music director of the Orchestre de Paris from 1972 to 1975. From 1979 until 1983, he was also principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He continued to expand his repertoire. With the London Philharmonic, he performed many of Elgar's major works in concert and on record. Before performing Elgar's two symphonies, Solti studied the composer's own recordings made more than 40 years earlier, and was influenced by their brisk tempi and impetuous manner. Edward Greenfield, music critic for The Guardian, wrote that Solti "conveys the authentic frisson of the great Elgarian moment more vividly than ever before on record." Late in his career he became enthusiastic about the music of Shostakovich, whom he admitted he failed to appreciate fully during the composer's lifetime. He made commercial recordings of seven of Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies. In 1983, Solti conducted for the only time at the Bayreuth Festival. By this stage in his career, he no longer liked abstract productions of Wagner, or modernistic reinterpretations, such as Patrice Chéreau's 1976 Bayreuth Centenary Ring, which he found grew boring on repetition. Together with the director Sir Peter Hall and designer William Dudley,…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a lăsat un gând

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Recordings Solti recorded throughout his career for the Decca Record Company. He made more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets. During the 1950s and 1960s, Decca had an alliance with RCA Victor, and some of Solti's recordings were first issued on the RCA label. Solti was one of the first conductors who came to international fame as a recording artist before being widely known in the concert hall or opera house. Gordon Parry, the Decca engineer who worked with Solti and Culshaw on the Ring recordings, observed, "Many people have said 'Oh well, of course John Culshaw made Solti.' This is not true. He gave him the opportunity to show what he could do." Solti's first recordings were as a piano accompanist, playing at sessions in Zurich for violinist Georg Kulenkampff in 1947. Decca's senior producer, Victor Olof did not much admire Solti as a conductor (nor did Walter Legge, Olof's opposite number at EMI's Columbia Records), but Olof's younger colleague and successor, Culshaw, held Solti in high regard. As Culshaw, and later James Walker, produced his recordings, Solti's career as a recording artist flourished from the mid-1950s. Among the orchestras with whom Solti recorded were the Berlin…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a lăsat un gând

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Honours and memorials Honours awarded to Solti included the British CBE (honorary), 1968, and an honorary knighthood (KBE), 1971, which became a substantive knighthood when he took British citizenship in 1972, after which he was known as Sir Georg Solti. He was also awarded honorary citizenship from the coastal town of Castiglione della Pescaia, in Tuscany, a holiday destination particularly frequented by celebrities where he owned a holiday house and used to spend the summer holidays with his wife and daughters. In Castiglione, the Georg Solti Accademia and the main piazza within the town's historic hamlet are named after Solti. Furthermore, Solti received a number of honours from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal and the US. He received honorary fellowships or degrees from the Royal College of Music and DePaul, Furman, Harvard, Leeds, London, Oxford, Surrey and Yale universities. In celebration of his 75th birthday in 1987, a bronze bust of Solti by Dame Elisabeth Frink was dedicated in Lincoln Park, Chicago, outside the Lincoln Park Conservatory. It was first displayed temporarily at the Royal Opera House in London. The sculpture was moved to Grant Park in 2006 in a new Solti Garden, near Orchestra Hall in…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a lăsat un gând

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Sources Culshaw, John (1967). Ring Resounding. London: Secker & Warburg. ISBN 0-436-11800-9. Culshaw, John (1982). Putting the Record Straight. London: Secker & Warburg. ISBN 0-436-11802-5. Glossop, Peter (2004). Yorkshire Baritone. Oxford: Guidon. ISBN 0-9543617-3-3. Goodman, Lord; Lord Harewood (1969). A Report on Opera and Ballet in the United Kingdom, 1966–69. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. OCLC 81272. Haltrecht, Montague (1975). The Quiet Showman – Sir David Webster and the Royal Opera House. London: Collins. ISBN 0-00-211163-2. Lebrecht, Norman (2000). Covent Garden: The Untold Story: Dispatches from the English Culture War, 1945–2000. London: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-684-85143-1. Levy, Richard S., ed. (2005). Antisemitism: a historical encyclopedia of prejudice and persecution, Volume 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 1-85109-439-3. Morrison, Richard (2004). Orchestra – The LSO. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-21584-X. Osborne, Richard (1998). Herbert von Karajan. London: Chatto and Windus. ISBN 1-85619-763-8. Peck, Donald (2007). The Right Place, the Right Time: Tales of Chicago Symphony Days. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-11688-0. Robinson, Paul (1979). Solti. London: Macdonald and Jane's. ISBN 0-354-04288-2. Sackville-West, Edward; Desmond Shawe-Taylor (1955). The Record Guide. London: Collins. OCLC 474839729. Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth (1982). On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge.…Citește mai mult

Georg Solti a lăsat un gând

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Georg Solti at IMDb "Music, First and Last": Scores from the Sir Georg Solti Archive, virtual exhibit, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard Library There are also significant archival holdings at CSO Rosenthal Archives, the British National Archives, and the Metropolitan Opera Archives.