Word: ansermet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Ernest Ansermet, 85, who founded I'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in 1918 and conducted it with precision and puissance for 49 years; of a heart attack; in Geneva. A daring innovator, Ansermet was acclaimed by critics for his imaginative forays into Ravel, Debussy and Stravinsky. The Suisse Romande was always his first love, but he also helped found I'Orchestre Symphonique de Paris and occasionally shared the baton with Toscanini at the New York Philharmonic...
...volumes of poetry and developing a passionate interest in that plant life around his suburban Vienna home. His calm perseverance as a composer in the face of ridicule and neglect gave him a saintly aura. To see him touch a single note on the piano, said Swiss Conductor Ernest Ansermet, was to see a man in an act of devotion...
...symphony form, he complained, caused him endless anxiety: "It is lively but not very much so, being somber and weighty too." His B Flat Major displays none of these characteristics. It is instead a pleasant, supple work, replete with gracefully phrased suggestions and intuitions, rather like prettified Wagner. Ernst Ansermet leads the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in an appropriately understated performance. Chausson was one of Cesar Franck's many dedicated disciples, and Les Bolides, a brief symphonic poem, shows that Franck is easily the more fluent composer...
...close friend Stravinsky was enraged, and the two had a falling out. When the invitation came to take part in the Philharmonic's Stravinsky festival, Ansermet accepted, hopeful of a reconciliation. But Stravinsky was delayed by illness in coming to Manhattan, and the expected meeting never took place. "I hope we can make peace," said Ansermet. "We are too old to fight...
...Substitute. Reconciliation or no, Ansermet will continue his assault on atonal music. After he retires from the Suisse Romande at the end of next season, one of his first projects will be to write a second book "in order to make the first book clear." His objections to atonality are not those of an old man clinging to the past, but of a musician expressing a carefully thought-out conviction. The trends in new music, he suggests, are simply a sad substitute for originality...