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Leopold Stokowski
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Leopold Stokowski (born Leopold Anthony Stokowski though on occasion in later life he amended his middle name to Antoni and added the family names Stanislaw Boleslawowicz) (April 18 1882 – September 13 1977) was a famous orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.
Stokowski performed with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and the Symphony of the Air.
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Encyclopedia
Leopold Stokowski (born Leopold Anthony Stokowski though on occasion in later life he amended his middle name to Antoni and added the family names Stanislaw Boleslawowicz) (April 18 1882 – September 13 1977) was a famous orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.
Stokowski performed with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and the Symphony of the Air. He was also the founder of the All-American Youth Orchestra, the New York City Symphony, the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra and The American Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the music for and appeared in Disney’s Fantasia and was portrayed
by Bugs Bunny in the 1948 Looney Tunes episode Long-Haired Hare.
Early life
Stokowski was the son of the English-born Polish cabinetmaker Kopernik Józef Boleslawowicz Stokowski and his Irish wife Annie Marion Stokowski, née Moore. There is some mystery surrounding his early life. For example, he spoke with a slightly Eastern European accent, though born and raised in London. In addition, on occasion, he gave his birth year as 1887 instead of 1882, as in a letter to the Hugo Riemann Musiklexicon in 1950, which also gave his birthplace as Krakow, Poland. Nicolas Slonimsky, editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians received a letter from a Finnish encyclopedia editor that said, "The Maestro himself told me that he was born in Pomerania, Germany, in 1889."
However, his birth certificate (signed by J. Claxton, registrar at the General Office, Somerset House, London, in the parish of All Souls, County of Middlesex) gives his birth on April 18, 1882, at 13 Upper Marylebone Street (now New Cavendish Street), in the Marylebone District of London. He was named after his Polish grandfather Leopold, who died in the county of Surrey on January 13, 1879, at the age of 49. The "mystery" surrounding his origins and accent is clarified in Oliver Daniel's 1000-page biography "Stokowski - A Counterpoint of View" (1982) wherein (Chapter 12) he reveals that Stokowski came under the influence of his first wife, the pianist Olga Samaroff, who, for professional and career reasons, "urged him to emphasize only the Polish part of his background" once he became domiciled in the USA.
Stokowski trained at the Royal College of Music, which he entered in 1896 at age thirteen, making him one of the youngest students to do so. In his later life in America he would perform six of the nine symphonies composed by fellow organ student Ralph Vaughan Williams. He sang in the choir of St. Marylebone Church and later became Assistant Organist to Sir Henry Walford Davies at The Temple Church. At the age of 16, he was elected to membership in the Royal College of Organists. In 1900 he formed the choir of St. Mary's Church, Charing Cross Road, where he trained the choirboys and played the organ. In 1902 he was appointed organist and choir director of St. James's Church, Piccadilly. He also attended The Queen's College, Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree in 1903.
Professional career
New York, Cincinnati
In 1905, Stokowski began work in New York City as the organist and choir director of St. Bartholomew's Church. He was very popular amongst the parishioners who included members of the Vanderbilt family, but eventually resigned the position in pursuit of a career of orchestra conductor. He moved to Paris for additional study before hearing that the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra would be needing a new conductor when it returned from a hiatus. So, in 1908, he began his campaign to obtain the position, writing multiple letters to the orchestra's president, Mrs. C. R. Holmes, and traveling to Cincinnati for a personal interview. Eventually he was granted the post and officially took up his duties in the fall of 1909. That was the year of his official conducting debut in Paris with the Colonne Orchestra on May 12 1909. His London debut took place the following week on May 18 with the New Symphony Orchestra at Queen's Hall.
Stokowski was a great success in Cincinnati, introducing the idea of "pop concerts" and conducting the United States premieres of new works by such composers as Edward Elgar whose 2nd Symphony was given there on November 24 1911. However, in early 1912, he became sufficiently frustrated with the politics of the orchestra's board that he tendered his resignation. There was a dispute over the resignation, but on April 12 it was finally accepted.
Philadelphia
Two months later, Stokowski was appointed director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and made his Philadelphia debut on October 11 1912. This position would bring him some of his greatest accomplishments and recognition. It has been suggested that Stokowski quit at Cincinnati knowing full well that the job in Philadelphia was already his, or as Oscar Levant suggested in his book A Smattering of Ignorance, "he had the contract in his back pocket." Before he took up his Philadelphia appointment, however, Stokowski returned to England to conduct two concerts at the Queen's Hall, London. On 22 May 1912 he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a programme which he was to repeat in its entirety 60 years later at the age of 90, and on 14 June 1912 he conducted an all-Wagner concert that featured the famous soprano, Lilian Nordica.
In 1914, he was elected to honorary membership in Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national fraternity for men in music.
Stokowski rapidly garnered a reputation as a showman. His flair for the theatrical included grand gestures such as throwing the sheet music on the floor to show he did not need to conduct from a score. He also experimented with lighting techniques in the concert hall, at one point conducting in a dark hall with only his head and hands lighted, at other times arranging the lights so they would cast theatrical shadows of his head and hands. Late in the 1929-30 season, he started conducting without a baton; his free-hand manner of conducting became one of his trademarks.
On the musical side, Stokowski nurtured the orchestra and shaped the "Stokowski" sound, or what became known as the "Philadelphia Sound". He encouraged "free bowing" from the string section, "free breathing" from the brass section, and continually altered the seating arrangements of the sections as well as the acoustics of the hall in order to create better sound. Stokowski is credited as being the first conductor to adopt the seating plan used by most orchestras today with first and second violins together on the left, violas and cellos on the right. But he was also known for tinkering with the orchestration of famous works by such composers as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, J.S. Bach and Brahms. In one instance, he even revised the ending of a work, the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, by Tchaikovsky, so that it would end quietly, taking his notion from Modest Tchaikovsky's Life and Letters of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky (translated by Rosa Newmarch: 1906) that the composer had provided a quiet ending of his own at Balakirev's suggestion. He made major revisions to Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, making significant alterations to Rimsky-Korsakov's adaptation of the work, and making it sound, in some places, similar to the original. In the film Fantasia, however, Stokowski did not end the work with a big climax, but allowed the last measures of it to segue right into the beginning of Schubert's Ave Maria.
Many serious music critics have been horrified at the liberties Stokowski took—liberties which were common in the nineteenth century, but had since mostly died out, as faithful adherence to the composer's score became more common. However, Stokowski often left scores completely unretouched, particularly those many hundreds of new works which he was conducting for the first time. On the other hand, he was by no means alone in his alterations to more familiar scores. Toscanini, for example, who had a reputation for "doing as written", was equally adept at making similar changes to composers' scores, as in Tchaikovsky's Manfred symphony, where he added tam-tam crashes to the end of the first movement, rewrote the wind, brass and string parts here and there, and cut 100 bars out of the finale. Toscanini's alterations, however, nearly always tended to be much more subtle, and much less frequent than Stokowski's.
Stokowski's repertoire was broad and included many contemporary works. He was the only conductor to perform all of Schoenberg's orchestral works during the composer's own lifetime, several of which were world premieres. He gave the first American performance of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder in 1932. It was recorded "live" on 78 rpm records and remained the only recording of the work in the catalog until the advent of the LP. Stokowski also gave the US Premieres of four of Shostakovich's symphonies, nos 1, 3, 6 and 11. In 1916, he conducted the United States premiere of Mahler's 8th Symphony. He added works by Rachmaninoff, giving the world premieres of his 3rd symphony, the 4th piano concerto and the Paganini Rhapsody; Sibelius, whose last three symphonies were given their US premieres in Philadelphia in the 1920s; and Igor Stravinsky, many of whose works were also given their first American performances by Stokowski. In 1922, he introduced The Rite of Spring to the USA, gave its first staged performance there in 1930 with Martha Graham dancing the part of The Chosen One, and at the same time made the first US recording of the work. Seldom an opera conductor, Stokowski did give the US premieres in Philadelphia of the original version of Mussorgky's Boris Godunov (1929) and Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1931). Many works by such composers as Bliss, Bruch, Busoni, Chavez, Copland, Enesco, Falla, Hindemith, Holst, Malipiero, Miaskovsky, Piston, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Ravel, Respighi, Roussel, Scriabin, Siegmeister, Szymanowski, Varese, Villa-Lobos, Webern, and Weill, amongst countless other lesser names, received their US Premieres under Stokowski's direction in Philadelphia.
In 1933, he started "Youth Concerts" for younger audiences, which are still a Philadelphia tradition, and fostered youth music programs.
After disputes with the board, Stokowski began to withdraw from involvement in The Philadelphia Orchestra from 1936 onwards, allowing co-conductor Eugene Ormandy to gradually take over. He shared principal conducting duties with Ormandy from 1936-1940 and did not return until 1960.
Stokowski appeared as himself in the motion picture The Big Broadcast of 1937, conducting two of his Bach transcriptions. That same year he also conducted and acted in One Hundred Men and a Girl, with Deanna Durbin and Adolphe Menjou. In 1939, Stokowski collaborated with Walt Disney to create the motion picture for which he is best known: Fantasia. He conducted all the music (with the exception of a "jam session" in the middle of the film) and included his own orchestrations for the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria segments. Stokowski even got to talk to (and shake hands with) Mickey Mouse on screen, although he would later say with a smile that Mickey Mouse got to shake hands with him. Most of the music was recorded in the Academy of Music, using multi-track stereophonic sound. Stokowski also appeared in the 1947 film Carnegie Hall along with Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, Jascha Heifetz, Artur Rubinstein, Ezio Pinza and other great classical musicians of the day.
On his return in 1960, Stokowski appeared with Philadelphia Orchestra as a guest conductor. He also made two LP recordings with them for Columbia Records, one including a performance of Manuel De Falla's El amor brujo, which he had introduced to America in 1922 and had previously recorded for RCA Victor with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra in 1946, and a Bach album which featured the 5th Brandenburg Concerto and three of his own Bach transcriptions. He continued to appear as a guest conductor on several more occasions, his final Philadelphia Orchestra concert taking place in 1969.
In honor of Stokowski's vast influence on music and the Philadelphia performing arts community, on February 24, 1969 he was awarded the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Award of Merit. Beginning in 1964, this award "established to bring a declaration of appreciation to an individual each year that has made a significant contribution to the world of music and helped to create a climate in which our talents may find valid expression."
All-American Youth Orchestra
With his Philadelphia Orchestra contract having expired in 1940, Stokowski immediately formed the All-American Youth Orchestra, its players' ages ranging from 18 to 25. It toured South America in 1940 and North America in 1941 and was met with rave reviews. Although Stokowski made a number of recordings with the AAYO for Columbia, the technical standard was not as high as had been achieved with the Philadelphia Orchestra for RCA Victor. In any event, the AAYO was disbanded when America entered the war and plans for another extensive tour in 1942 were abandoned.
NBC Symphony Orchestra
During this time, Stokowski also became chief conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra on a three-year contract (1941-1944). The NBC's regular conductor, Arturo Toscanini, did not wish to undertake the 1941-42 NBC season though he did accept guest engagements with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski conducted a great deal of contemporary music with the NBC Symphony, including the US premiere of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky in 1943, the world premieres of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto (with Eduard Steuermann) and Antheil's 4th Symphony, both in 1944, and new works by Hovhaness, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Milhaud, Howard Hanson, William Schumann, Morton Gould and many others. He also conducted several British works with this orchestra, including Vaughan Williams' 4th Symphony, Holst's The Planets, and George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad. Stokowski also made a number of recordings with the NBC Symphony for RCA Victor, including Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, a work which was never in Toscanini's repertoire. Toscanini then returned as co-conductor of the NBC Symphony with Stokowski for the remaining two years of the latter's contract.
New York City Symphony Orchestra
In 1944, on the recommendation of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Stokowski helped form the New York City Symphony Orchestra, which they intended would make music accessible for middle-class workers. Ticket prices were set low, and performances took place at convenient, after-work hours. Many early concerts were standing room only; however, a year later in 1945, Stokowski was at odds with the board (who wanted to trim expenses even further) and he resigned. Stokowski made three 78pm sets with the New York City Symphony for RCA: Beethoven's 6th Symphony, Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, and a selection of orchestral music from Bizet's Carmen.
Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra
In 1945, he founded the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra lasted for two years before it was disbanded for live concerts, but not for recordings, which continued well into the 1960s. Stokowski's own recordings (made in 1945-46) included Brahms's 1st Symphony, Tchaikovsky's Pathetique and a number of short popular pieces. Some of Stokowski's open-air HBSO concerts were broadcast and recorded, and have been issued on CD, including a collaboration with Percy Grainger on Grieg's Piano Concerto in the summer of 1945. (It began giving live concerts again as the "Hollywood Bowl Orchestra" in 1991, under John Mauceri). There was a memorable 1949 cartoon spoof of Stokowski at the Bowl with Bugs Bunny playing the conductor in "Long-Haired Hare" by Chuck Jones.
New York Philharmonic
He continued to appear frequently with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, both at the Hollywood Bowl and other venues. Then in 1946 Stokowski became a chief Guest Conductor of the New York Philharmonic. His many "first performances" with them included the US Premiere of Prokofiev's 6th Symphony in 1949. He also made many splendid recordings with the NYPO for Columbia, including the World Premiere Recordings of Vaughan Williams's 6th Symphony and Messiaen's L'Ascension also in 1949.
International career
However, when in 1950 Dimitri Mitropoulos was appointed Chief Conductor of the NYPO, Stokowski began a new international career which commenced in 1951 with a nation-wide tour of England: during the Festival of Britain celebrations he conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the invitation of Sir Thomas Beecham. It was during this first visit that he made his debut recording with a British orchestra, the Philharmonia, of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade. During that same summer he also toured and conducted in Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, and Portugal, establishing a pattern of guest-conducting abroad during the summer months while spending the winter seasons conducting in the USA. This scheme was to hold good for the next 20 years during which Stokowski conducted many of the world's greatest orchestras, simultaneously making recordings with them for various labels. Thus he conducted and recorded with the main London orchestras as well as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Suisse Romande Orchestra, the French National Radio Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, the Hilversum (Netherlands) Radio Philharmonic, and so on.
Symphony of the Air, Houston Symphony Orchestra
Stokowski returned to the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1954 for a series of recording sessions for RCA. The repertoire included Beethoven's 'Pastoral' Symphony, Sibelius's 2nd Symphony, Acts 2 & 3 of Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake' and highlights from Saint-Saëns's Samson and Delilah with Rise Stevens and Jan Peerce. After the NBC Symphony Orchestra was disbanded as the official ensemble of the NBC radio network, it was re-formed as the Symphony of the Air with Stokowski as notional Music Director, and as such performed many concerts and made recordings from 1954 until 1963.
From 1955 to 1961, Stokowski was also the Music Director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. For his debut appearance with the orchestra he gave the first performance of the Symphony No.2 Mysterious Mountain by Alan Hovhaness - one of many living American composers whose music he championed over the years. He also gave the US Premiere in Houston of Shostakovich's 11th Symphony (7 April 1958) and made its first American recording. Stokowski's other recordings with the Houston Symphony included Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and his own edition of Gliere's Ilya Mouremetz Symphony.
American Symphony Orchestra and London
In 1960, Stokowski made one of his infrequent appearances in the opera house, when he conducted Puccini's Turandot at the New York Metropolitan, in memorable performances with a cast that included Birgit Nilsson, Franco Corelli and Anna Moffo. In 1962, at the age of 80, Stokowski founded the American Symphony Orchestra. He served as Music Director for the orchestra, until May 1972 when, at the age of 90, he returned to England. One of his notable British guest conducting engagements in the 1960s was the first Proms performance of Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, since issued on CD. He continued to conduct in public for a few more years, but failing health forced him to only make recordings. An eyewitness said that Stokowski often conducted sitting down in his later years; sometimes, as he became involved in the performance, he would stand up and conduct with remarkable energy. His last public appearance in the UK took place at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on May 14 1974. Stokowski conducted the New Philharmonia in the 'Merry Waltz' of Otto Klemperer (in tribute to the orchestra's former Music Director who had died the previous year), Vaughan Williams's 'Tallis Fantasia', Ravel's 'Rapsodie Espagnole' and Brahms's 4th Symphony. Stokowski's very last public appearance took place during the 1975 Vence Music Festival in the South of France, when on July 22 he conducted the Rouen Chamber Orchestra in several of his Bach transcriptions.
Recordings
Stokowski made his very first recordings, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, for the Victor Talking Machine Company in October 1917, beginning with two of Brahms' Hungarian Dances. Other works recorded in the early sessions were the scherzo from Felix Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music and "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" from Gluck's Orfeus and Euridice. He found ways to make the best use of the acoustical process, until electrical recording was introduced by Victor in the spring of 1925. Stokowski conducted the first orchestral electrical recording to be made in America (Saint-Saens's Danse Macabre) in April 1925. The following month Stokowski recorded Marche Slave by Tchaikovsky, in which he increased the double basses to best utilize the lower frequencies of early electrical recording. Stokowski was also the first conductor in America to record all four Brahms symphonies (between 1927 and 1933). He made the first US recordings of the Beethoven 7th and 9th Symphonies, Dvorak's 'New World', Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony and Nutcracker Suite, the Franck Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto (with the composer as soloist), Sibelius's 4th Symphony (its first recording), Shostakovich's 5th and 6th Symphonies, and many shorter works.
His early recordings were made at Victor's Camden, New Jersey studios but then, in 1927, Victor began recording the orchestra in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra later participated in long playing, high fidelity, and stereophonic experiments, during the early 1930s, mostly for Bell Laboratories. (Victor even released some LPs at this time, which were not commercially successful because they required special, expensive phonographs that most people could not afford during the Great Depression.) Stokowski recorded prodigiously for various labels until shortly before his death, including RCA Victor, Columbia, Capitol, Everest, United Artists, and Decca/London 'Phase 4' Stereo.
His first commercial stereo recordings were made in 1954 for RCA Victor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, devoted to excerpts from Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet and the complete one-act ballet Sebastian by Gian Carlo Menotti.
From 1947-1953 Stokowski recorded for RCA Victor with a specially-assembled 'ad hoc' band of players drawn principally from the New York Philharmonic and NBC Symphony. The LPs were labelled as being played by 'Leopold Stokowski and his Symphony Orchestra' and the repertoire ranged from Haydn (his Imperial Symphony) to Schoenberg (Transfigured Night) by way of Schumann, Liszt, Bizet, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Debussy and Vaughan Williams.
His Capitol recordings in the 1950s were distinguished by the use of three-track stereophonic tape recorders. Typically, Stokowski was very careful in the placement of musicians during the recording sessions and consulted with the recording staff to achieve the best possible results. Some of the sessions took place in the ballroom of the Riverside Plaza Hotel in New York City in January and February 1957; these were produced by Richard C. Jones and engineered by Frank Abbey with Stokowski's own orchestra, which was typically drawn from New York musicians (primarily members of the Symphony of the Air). The CD reissue by EMI included selections originally released on two LPs -- The Orchestra and Landmarks of a Distinguished Career -- and featured music of Paul Dukas, Samuel Barber, Richard Strauss, Harold Farberman, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Vincent Persichetti, Peter Tchaikovsky, Modeste Mussorgsky, Claude Debussy, Johann Sebastian Bach (as arranged by Stokowski), and Jean Sibelius. Although he officially used the Maurice Ravel orchestration of the finale to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in his 1957 Capitol recording, he did add a few additional percussion instruments to the score. His Capitol recording of Gustav Holst's The Planets was made with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. EMI, which acquired Capitol and Angel Records in the 1950s, has reissued many of Stokowski's Capitol recordings on CD.
All of the music that Stokowski conducted in Fantasia was released on a 3-LP set by Disneyland Records, in the 1957 soundtrack album made from the film. After stereo became possible on phonograph records, the album was released in stereo on Buena Vista Records. With the advent of compact discs, it appeared on a 2-CD Walt Disney Records set, in conjunction with the film's 50th anniversary.
Other labels for which Stokowski recorded in the late 1950s included Everest, noted for its use of 35 mm film instead of tape and the resulting highly vivid sound. The most notable of these was a coupling of Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini and Hamlet with Stokowski conducting the New York Stadium Symphony Orchestra (the summer name for the New York Philharmonic).
Stokowski as Transcriber
Stokowski was celebrated as a transcriber of music originally written in other forms. His catalogue includes about 200 orchestral arrangements, nearly 40 of which are transcriptions of the works of J. S. Bach. During the 1920s and '30s, Stokowski arranged many of Bach's keyboard and instrumental works, as well as songs and cantata movements, for very large forces as well as just for strings alone. The most famous of them, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, originally for organ, served as the opening item in Walt Disney's Fantasia and brought this magnificent music to a wide audience. Much admired in their day, these transcriptions are again being played now, and conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, Matthias Bamert, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Seiji Ozawa, Erich Kunzel and Jose Serebrier are among many who have performed and recorded Stokowski's Bach transcriptions. Even so, they are still considered by some purists to be bastardizations of the works, though as Stokowski pointed out, Bach himself was an inveterate transcriber of the music of others, notably Vivaldi. Today the organ works of Bach are widely heard in their original form via recordings and concerts, much more so than during Stokowski's time. Whether his transcriptions encouraged this resurgence of interest in Bach's organ music is a matter of debate.
In 1939, Stokowski also made his own orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, in which he omitted two of the movements "Tuileries", and "The Marketplace at Limoges" from the score. The composer and arranger Lucien Cailliet, a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra who also acted as "house arranger", had assisted Stokowski in the copying of many of Stokowski's transcriptions, something which led to the incorrect assumption that they were Cailliet's work and not Stokowski's. In fact, many of Stokowski's penciled manuscripts still survive in the Stokowski Collection at the University of Pennsylvania. It was from these that Cailliet made good ink copies in his excellent calligraphic hand, and thus started the unfounded rumour that Stokowski's transcriptions were not his own work. Cailliet had actually created his own orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition in 1936, and as Ormandy's RCA Victor recording shows, it is quite different from Stokowski's arrangement. As it happens, in recent years Stokowski's version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition has become a popular alternative to Ravel's, both in the concert-hall and on disc.
Stokowski also took passages from Wagner operas and seamlessly wove them into purely orchestral "Symphonic Syntheses" in which the vocal parts were transferred to the strings or solo instruments. Many of his shorter arrangements, such as those of songs and piano pieces by Schubert, Tchaikovsky and so on, served as delightful "encores" with which he often concluded his concerts, rather in the same manner as Sir Thomas Beecham did with his "lollipops." Many of today's conductors have taken Stokowski's transcriptions into their own repertoire and two of his former assistants, Matthias Bamert and Jose Serebrier, have both made an extensive series of recordings of them (for Chandos and Naxos respectively).
Last years
Stokowski continued to make recordings even after he'd retired from the concert platform, mainly with the National Philharmonic, another 'ad hoc' orchestra made up of first-desk players chosen from the main London orchestras. In 1976, he signed a recording contract with CBS Records that would have kept him active until he was 100 years old. However, he died of a heart attack the following year in Nether Wallop, Hampshire at 95. His very last recordings, made shortly before his death, for Columbia, included remarkably youthful performances of the Symphony in C by Georges Bizet and Felix Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony (No. 4), with the National Philharmonic Orchestra in London.
Personal life
Stokowski married three times. His first wife was the American concert pianist Olga Samaroff (born Lucie Hickenlooper), to whom he was married from 1911 until 1923 (one daughter: Sonia Stokowski, an actress). His second wife was Johnson & Johnson heiress Evangeline Love Brewster Johnson, an artist and aviator, to whom he was married from 1926 until 1937 (two children: Gloria Luba Stokowski and Andrea Sadja Stokowski). His third wife, from 1945 until 1955, was railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt (born 1924), an artist and fashion designer (two sons, Leopold Stanislaus Stokowski b. 1950 and Christopher Stokowski b. 1952). He also had a much-publicized affair with Greta Garbo during the 1930s.
After he had achieved international fame with the Philadelphia Orchestra, unsubstantiated rumours circulated that he was born "Leonard" or "Lionel Stokes" or that he had "anglicized" it to "Stokes"; this canard is readily disproved by reference not only to his birth certificate and those of his father, younger brother, and sister (which show Stokowski to have been the genuine Polish family name), but also by the Student Entry Registers of the Royal College of Music, Royal College of Organists, and The Queen's College, Oxford, along with other surviving documentation from his days at St. Marylebone Church, St. James's Church, and St. Bartholomew's in New York City. Upon his arrival in America, however, he briefly spelled his name as Stokovski to ensure that people could pronounce it correctly.
After Stokowski's death, Tom Burnam writes, the "concatenization of canards" that had arisen around him was revived--that his name and accent were phony; that his musical education was deficient; that his musicians did not respect him; that he cared about nobody but himself. Burnam suggests that there was a dark, hidden reason for these rumors. Stokowski deplored the segregation of symphony orchestras in which women and minorities were excluded, and, so Burnam claims, the bigots got revenge by slandering Stokowski.
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the claims made by Tom Burnam, attitudes towards Stokowski have changed dramatically over the years since his death. In 1999, for Gramophone magazine, and quoted again in his notes for the Cala CD of Stokowski's recording of Elgar's Enigma Variations, David Mellor wrote: "One of the great joys of recent years for me has been the reassessment of Leopold Stokowski. When I was growing up there was a tendency to disparage the old man as a charlatan. Today it is all very different. Stokowski is now recognised as the father of modern orchestral standards. He possessed a truly magical gift of extracting a burnished sound from both great and second-rank ensembles. He also loved the process of recording and his gramophone career was a constant quest for better recorded sound. But the greatest pleasure of all for me is his acceptance now as an outstanding conductor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, including a lot that was at the cutting edge of contemporary achievement."
Mellor's words have been echoed by many other modern writers, such as Robert Matthew-Walker of International Record Review, whose comments fairly represent the opinions of many critics today: "That Stokowski was a great musician is beyond doubt; that he was a great conductor is self-evident; that he always placed himself at the service of the music may be more contentious to some ears, but in keeping with the established norms of the age into which he was born and musically nurtured, Stokowski remained loyal to those precepts from which we, in an era far removed from their prevalence, can still learn and draw aesthetic sustenance."
Stokowski is buried at East Finchley Cemetery, in north London.
See also
Bibliography
- Daniel, Oliver (1982). Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View.
- Rollin Smith (2005) "Stokowski and the Organ".
- Paul Robinson (1977) "Stokowski: The Art of the Conductor".
- Abram Chasins (1979) "Leopold Stokowski: A Profile".
- Preben Opperby (1982) "Leopold Stokowski".
- William Ander Smith (1990) "The Mystery of Leopold Stokowski".
- Leopold Stokowski (1943) "Music for All of Us".
- Herbert Kupferberg (1969) "Those Fabulous Philadelphians"
Notable premieres
Concerts
- Varèse, Ameriques, Philadelphia Orchestra, Philadelphia, April 9 1926
- Rachmaninoff, Fourth Piano Concerto, composer as soloist, Philadelphia Orchestra, 1927
- Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, composer as soloist, Philadelphia Orchestra, Baltimore, November 7 1934
- Rachmaninoff, Third Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, 1936
- Schoenberg, Violin Concerto, Louis Krasner as soloist, Philadelphia Orchestra, December 6 1940
- Schoenberg, Piano Concerto, Eduard Steuermann as soloist, NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York, February 16 1944
- Hovhaness, Symphony No.2 Mysterious Mountain, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Houston, 1955
(Bach) Prelude in E Flat Minor, BMV 853) 1927 Philadelphia Orchestra
- Sibelius, Fourth Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, April 23 1932, Victor
- Shostakovich, Sixth Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, August 1940, Victor
- Vaughan Williams, Sixth Symphony, Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of New York, February 21 1949, Columbia
- Ives, Fourth Symphony, American Symphony Orchestra, April 1965, Columbia
External links
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