Word: monteux
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...close to the head of the symphonic class. The San Francisco Symphony, approximately 15% of whose annual budget is paid out of taxes, is one of the half-dozen finest orchestras in the U.S. It is kept so by San Francisco's first musical citizen, walrus-mustached Pierre Monteux. To those who watch Pierre Monteux still gay and zealous in the midst of music, it seems incredible that next week he will be 69 years...
When, in 1935, the San Francisco Musical Association cast about for someone to rescue the San Francisco Symphony from complete financial and artistic collapse, Monteux was suggested for the job. He was then guest-conducting at the-Hollywood Bowl. "The only difference between Toscanini and Monteux," New York Times Critic Olin Downes is reported to have remarked, "is in the waistline." San Francisco took the waistline, soon found that it surrounded one of the most sensitive, civilized, versatile and shrewdly practical men who ever wielded a baton...
...Pierre Monteux is also one of the very few Frenchmen whose favorite composer is the arch-Germanic Johannes Brahms. San Franciscans have marveled at the Rhine wine savor of his Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann, as well as the elegance of his Debussy and Ravel. Pierre Monteux's ranging tastes and orchestral mastery have come to him during a lifetime in which he has conducted no less than 63 symphony orchestras in Europe...
Debussy: Images Nos. 1 & 3 (San Francisco Symphony, Pierre Monteux conducting; Victor; 4 sides). Seldom performed, never before recorded, Debussy's Gigues and Rondes de Printemps have never been so popular as Image No. 2, better known by its subtitle Ibéria. Nor are they quite up to Ibéria as music. Performance: excellent. Recording: excellent...
...promising of the remaining U.S. orchestras as the season opened were: the Chicago (Belgian-born Désiré De-fauw succeeded the late Frederick Stock) ; Cleveland (Austrian-born Erich Leinsdorf, formerly of the Metropolitan Opera House, succeeded the Philharmonic's Rodzinski); Minneapolis (Dimitri Mitropoulos) ; San Francisco (Pierre Monteux) ; Cincinnati (Eugene Goossens); St. Louis (Vladimir Golschmann); Detroit (U.S.-born Karl Krueger had managed to pull things together again after the orchestra became the temporary charge of Sam's Cut-Rate, Inc.-TIME, Oct. 19); Los Angeles (U.S.-born Alfred Wallenstein succeeded a string of guests); National Symphony...