George Szell's Reign
George Szell's Reign

Author: Marcia Hansen Kraus

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2017-10-11

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0252099915

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George Szell was the Cleveland Orchestra's towering presence for over a quarter of a century. From the boardroom to the stage, Szell's powerful personality affected every aspect of a musical institution he reshaped in his own perfectionist image. Marcia Hansen Kraus's participation in Cleveland's classical musical scene allowed her an intimate view of Szell and his achievements. As a musician herself, and married to an oboist who worked under Szell, Kraus pulls back the curtain on this storied era through fascinating interviews with orchestra musicians and patrons. Their recollections combine with Kraus's own to paint a portrait of a multifaceted individual who both earned and transcended his tyrannical reputation. If some musicians hated Szell, others loved him or at the least respected his fair-minded toughness. A great many remember playing under his difficult leadership as the high point in their lives. Filled with vivid backstage stories, George Szell's Reign reveals the human side of a great orchestra ”and how one visionary built a premier classical music institution.

George Szell
George Szell

Author: Michael Charry

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2014-01-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780252080036

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This book is the first full biography of George Szell, one of the greatest orchestra and opera conductors of the twentieth century. From child prodigy pianist and composer to world-renowned conductor, Szell's career spanned seven decades, and he led most of the great orchestras and opera companies of the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the NBC and Chicago Symphonies, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and Opera, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. A protégé of composer-conductor Richard Strauss at the Berlin State Opera, his crowning achievement was his twenty-four-year tenure as musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra, transforming it into one of the world's greatest ensembles, touring triumphantly in the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, South Korea, and Japan. Michael Charry, a conductor who worked with Szell and interviewed him, his family, and his associates over several decades, draws on this first-hand material and correspondence, orchestra records, reviews, and other archival sources to construct a lively and balanced portrait of Szell's life and work from his birth in 1897 in Budapest to his death in 1970 in Cleveland. Readers will follow Szell from his career in Europe, Great Britain, and Australia to his guest conducting at the New York Philharmonic and his distinguished tenure at the Metropolitan Opera and Cleveland Orchestra. Charry details Szell's personal and musical qualities, his recordings and broadcast concerts, his approach to the great works of the orchestral repertoire, and his famous orchestrational changes and interpretation of the symphonies of Robert Schumann. The book also lists Szell's conducting repertoire and includes a comprehensive discography. In highlighting Szell's legacy as a teacher and mentor as well as his contributions to orchestral and opera history, this biography will be of lasting interest to concert-goers, music lovers, conductors, musicians inspired by Szell's many great performances, and new generations who will come to know those performances through Szell's recorded legacy.

Tales from the Locker Room
Tales from the Locker Room

Author: Lawrence Angell

Publisher: ATBOSH Media Ltd.

Published: 2019-11

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1626131511

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One of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, George Szell led the Cleveland Orchestra from 1946 until his death in 1970. A meticulous perfectionist, Szell was known to be an autocratic taskmaster who wielded total artistic control. Under his leadership he transformed the orchestra into a world class ensemble. Tales From the Locker Room gives a rare, honest, humorous and at times brutal look at this musical genius through first hand interviews, stories, and anecdotes by members of the Cleveland Orchestra who served under him.

Korngold and His World
Korngold and His World

Author: Daniel Goldmark

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-08-27

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0691198292

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Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was lauded in his youth by everyone from Mahler to Puccini and his auspicious career in the early 1900s spanned chamber music, opera, and musical theater. Today, he is best known for his Hollywood film scores, composed between 1935 and 1947.

The Cleveland Orchestra Story
The Cleveland Orchestra Story

Author: Donald Rosenberg

Publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 754

ISBN-13: 1886228248

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How did a late-blooming midwestern orchestra rise amid gritty Big Industry to become a titan in the world of Big Art? This groundbreaking book tells the complete story of the people and events that shaped the Cleveland Orchestra into a classical music legend. It taps the most authoritative sources to show how decisions were made along the often bumpy road to artistic and financial success. Told with plenty of anecdotes and intriguing behind-the-scenes details.

Danzón Days
Danzón Days

Author: Hettie Malcomson

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2023-05-23

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 025205427X

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Older people negotiating dance routines, intimacy, and racialized differences provide a focal point for an ethnography of danzón in Veracruz, the Mexican city closely associated with the music-dance genre. Hettie Malcomson draws upon on-site research with semi-professional musicians and amateur dancers to reveal how danzón connects, and does not connect, to blackness, joyousness, nostalgia, ageing, and romance. Challenging pervasive utopian views of danzón, Malcomson uses the idea of ambivalence to explore the frictions and opportunities created by seemingly contrary sentiments, ideas, sensations, and impulses. Interspersed with experimental ethnographic vignettes, her account takes readers into black and mestizo elements of local identity in Veracruz, nostalgic and newer styles of music and dance, and the friendships, romances, and rivalries at the heart of regular danzón performance and its complex social world. Fine-grained and evocative, Danzón Days journeys to one of the genre’s essential cities to provide new perspectives on aging and romance and new explorations of nostalgia and ambivalence.

Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry
Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry

Author: Sandra Jean Graham

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2018-02-26

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0252050304

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Spirituals performed by jubilee troupes became a sensation in post-Civil War America. First brought to the stage by choral ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spirituals anchored a wide range of late nineteenth-century entertainments, including minstrelsy, variety, and plays by both black and white companies. In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they lay the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century. A companion website contains jubilee troupe personnel, recordings, and profiles of 85 jubilee groups. Please go to: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/graham/spirituals/

The Possibility Machine
The Possibility Machine

Author: Jake Johnson

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2023-10-10

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0252055012

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Singular and star-studded writings on America’s neon-lit playground At once a Technicolor wonderland and the embodiment of American mythology, Las Vegas exists at the Ground Zero of a reverence for risk-taking and the transformative power of a winning hand. Jake Johnson edits a collection of short essays and flash ideas that probes how music-making and soundscapes shape the City of Second Chances. Treating topics ranging from Cher to Cirque de Soleil, the contributors delve into how music and musicians factored in the early development of Vegas’s image; the role of local communities of musicians and Strip mainstays in sustaining tensions between belief and disbelief; the ways aging showroom stars provide a sense of timelessness that inoculates visitors against the outside world; the link connecting fantasies of sexual prowess and democracy with the musical values of Liberace and others; considerations of how musicians and establishments gambled with identity and opened the door for audience members to explore Sin City–only versions of themselves; and the echoes and energy generated by the idea of Las Vegas as it travels across the country. Contributors: Celine Ayala, Kirstin Bews, Laura Dallman, Joanna Dee Das, James Deaville, Robert Fink, Pheaross Graham, Jessica A. Holmes, Maddie House-Tuck, Jake Johnson, Kelly Kessler, Michael Kinney, Carlo Lanfossi, Jason Leddington, Janis McKay, Sam Murray, Louis Niebur, Lynda Paul, Arianne Johnson Quinn, Michael M. Reinhard, Laura Risk, Cassaundra Rodriguez, Arreanna Rostosky, and Brian F. Wright

Interviews with American Composers
Interviews with American Composers

Author: Barney Childs

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2022-01-25

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0252052927

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In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff, and others. Virginia Anderson edits the first published collection of these conversations. She pairs each interview with a contextual essay by a contemporary expert that shows how the composer's discussion with Childs fits into his life and work. Together, the interviewees cover a broad range of ideas and concerns around topics like education, notation, developments in electronic music, changing demands on performers, and tonal music. Innovative and revealing, Interviews with American Composers is an artistic and historical snapshot of American music at an important crossroads.

The Propaganda of Freedom
The Propaganda of Freedom

Author: Joseph Horowitz

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0252054792

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The perils of equating notions of freedom with artistic vitality Eloquently extolled by President John F. Kennedy, the idea that only artists in free societies can produce great art became a bedrock assumption of the Cold War. That this conviction defied centuries of historical evidence--to say nothing of achievements within the Soviet Union--failed to impact impregnable cultural Cold War doctrine. Joseph Horowitz writes: “That so many fine minds could have cheapened freedom by over-praising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War.” He shows how the efforts of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom were distorted by an anti-totalitarian “psychology of exile” traceable to its secretary general, the displaced Russian aristocrat/composer Nicolas Nabokov, and to Nabokov’s hero Igor Stravinsky. In counterpoint, Horowitz investigates personal, social, and political factors that actually shape the creative act. He here focuses on Stravinsky, who in Los Angeles experienced a “freedom not to matter,” and Dmitri Shostakovich, who was both victim and beneficiary of Soviet cultural policies. He also takes a fresh look at cultural exchange and explores paradoxical similarities and differences framing the popularization of classical music in the Soviet Union and the United States. In closing, he assesses the Kennedy administration’s arts advocacy initiatives and their pertinence to today’s fraught American national identity. Challenging long-entrenched myths, The Propaganda of Freedom newly explores the tangled relationship between the ideology of freedom and ideals of cultural achievement.