Word: szell
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EVERY obituary writer, and every music critic, in this country has by now observed that John Barbirolli and Goerge Szell were polar opposites. While Barbirolli was the actual successor of Toscanini in the New York post, Szell was, in a very real sense, his spiritual successor. Toscanini and Szell were cut from the same cloth: men of precision who held tight rein over their orchestras and insisted on perfection in their performers. Like Barbirolli, Szell was a distinguished soloist in his own right. To a far greater degree than Barbirolli, he pursued his career as an instrumentalist all his life...
...Szell's musical training was remarkably good. Max Reger was his composition teacher, and his mentor was Richard Strauss. It was at the recommendation of Strauss that he received his first appointment as a conductor, at the Strasbourg Opera. His career was more scholarly than Barbirolli's had been; when he advanced to the post of principal conductor of the Berlin State Opera, he also served as Professor at the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin. A Hungarian national, Szell left Germany during the Nazi era and conducted throughout the world, from Australia to Edinburgh...
...Szell's musical odyssey ended in Cleveland, where he put together a fine orchestra. But due to the unfortunate priorities of the record market, we do not have as much of Szell on discs as we could have. The company for which he recorded also holds contracts with the New York Philharmonic, and, until recently, recorded the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is widely believed Szell felt severely neglected by Columbia, which recognized the general popularity of such well-known figures as Leonard Bernstein and Eugene Ormandy, and conducted elaborate advertising campaigns for their records. The company seemed to record less...
Many a first-rate pianist has taken up conducting as a career. For Leonard Bernstein, the late George Szell and Daniel Barenboim, it was largely a matter of having a large and effusive talent-or sheer ambition-that simply had to spread into other fields. When Pianist Leon Fleisher took the podium last week at Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, however, it was a case of dire necessity. Though he was once the foremost pianist of his generation, his right hand has been partly crippled since 1965, and he is trying to establish himself in a new career...
Died. George Szell, 73, conductor of Cleveland's orchestra (see Music...