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Serge Koussevitzky
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Dr. Sergei Aleksandrovich Koussevitzky (July 26, 1874 – June 4, 1951), was a Russian-born conductor, composer, and double-bassist known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949. (His forename is transliterated into English as either Sergei or Serge and his surname is transliterated as variously Koussevitzky, Koussevitsky, Kussevitzky or, into Polish as Kusewicki.)
sevitzky was born into a poor Jewish family, growing up in Vyshny Volochyok, Tver Oblast, about 250 km northwest of Moscow.
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Encyclopedia
Dr. Sergei Aleksandrovich Koussevitzky (July 26, 1874 – June 4, 1951), was a Russian-born conductor, composer, and double-bassist known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949. (His forename is transliterated into English as either Sergei or Serge and his surname is transliterated as variously Koussevitzky, Koussevitsky, Kussevitzky or, into Polish as Kusewicki.)
Biography
Early career
Koussevitzky was born into a poor Jewish family, growing up in Vyshny Volochyok, Tver Oblast, about 250 km northwest of Moscow. His parents were professional musicians who taught him violin, cello, and piano. At the age of fourteen he received a scholarship to the Musico-Dramatic Institute in Moscow for the study of double bass and music theory. He excelled at the bass, joining the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra at the age of twenty and succeeding his teacher as the principal bassist at twenty-seven. In 1901, he made his début as a soloist in Moscow, and won critical acclaim for his first Berlin recital in 1903. In 1902 he married his first wife, the dancer Nadezhda Galat. The same year he wrote a popular concerto for the double bass. Koussevitzky divorced his first wife and married Natalie Ushkov, the daughter of an extremely wealthy tea merchant, in 1905. At some time before this he had converted from Judaism to Christianity. The couple moved to Germany. In Berlin Sergei studied conducting under Arthur Nikisch, using his new-found wealth to pay off his teacher's gambling debts.
Conductor and publisher
In 1908 Koussevitzky made his professional début as a conductor, hiring and leading a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic. The next year he founded his own orchestra in Moscow and branched out into the publishing business, forming his own firm and buying the catalogues of many of the greatest composers of the age. Among the composers published by Koussevitzky were Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, and Nikolai Medtner. During the period 1909 to 1920 he established himself as a brilliant conductor in Europe. After the Russian Revolution, he returned to his homeland for a brief time to conduct the State Symphony Orchestra of Petrograd; in 1920, he made his way to Paris, where he organized the Concerts Koussevitzky, presenting new works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Maurice Ravel. In 1924 he moved to the United States, and would become a citizen in 1941.
In America
Koussevitzky was appointed conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1924, beginning a golden era for the ensemble that would continue until 1949. Over the next twenty-five years, he continued building the ensemble's reputation as a leading American orchestra, and developing its summer concert and educational programs at Tanglewood. In the early 1940s, he discovered a young tenor named Alfredo Cocozza, who would later be known as Mario Lanza, and provided him with a scholarship to attend Tanglewood. With the Boston Symphony he made numerous recordings, most of which were well-regarded by critics. His students and protégés included Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Adler, and Sarah Caldwell. Bernstein guest-conducted the Boston Symphony, including the 1951 world premiere of Charles Ives' Symphony No. 2. Bernstein's very last concert, in August 1990, was with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood. In Joan Peyser's book Bernstein: A Biography, she writes that Bernstein once received a pair of cufflinks from Koussevitzky as a gift, and thereafter wore them at every concert he conducted.
Champion of contemporary music
In 1922, Koussevitzky commissioned what has come to be known as one of the greatest and most popular examples of orchestration in the repertoire, Maurice Ravel's arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's 1874 suite for piano, Pictures at an Exhibition. It was premiered in Paris in 1923, and quickly became the most famous and celebrated orchestration of the work that had ever been made. Conductor Arturo Toscanini, who apparently had no great fondness for 19th century Russian music, considered the Mussorgsky-Ravel version of Pictures the greatest example of orchestration that had yet been produced, and performed and recorded the work for RCA Victor in 1953. Koussevitzky held the rights to this version for many years, and after his death, practically every celebrated conductor in existence recorded it.
Koussevitzky was a great champion of modern music, commissioning a number of works from prominent composers. For the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 50th anniversary he commissioned Ravel's piano concerto, George Gershwin's Second Rhapsody, Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4, which Prokofiev later revised, Paul Hindemith's Concert Music for Strings and Brass, and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, as well as works by Albert Roussel and Howard Hanson.
Legacy
In 1942 he founded the Koussevitzky Music Foundations, whose charge is to foster and commission the performance of new work. Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, Douglas Moore's opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3, and Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie are all direct results of the foundations.
Following Koussevitzky's 1951 death, his widow, Olga Koussevitzky, presented double-bassist Gary Karr with his double bass, previously believed to be fabricated in 1611 by brothers Antonio and Girolamo Amati. The instrument now bears the names of both Karr and Koussevitzky.
Recordings
Sergei Koussevitzky recorded with the Boston Symphony exclusively for RCA Victor, excepting a live recording made with Columbia (Roy Harris, "Symphony 1933") in Carnegie Hall, New York, during a concert on portable equipment. One quite notable early RCA session in Boston's Symphony Hall in 1929 was devoted to an early recording of Ravel's Boléro, and his very first sessions with the Boston orchestra of Beethoven's "Pastorale" Symphony and a suite from Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" were recorded in Symphony Hall in 1927. His younger brother Fabian "Sevitzky" conducted the Indianapolis Symphony during this same period, making several recordings of his own for RCA Victor.
Some of Koussevitzky's later recordings, including performances of the second suite from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (1945, Symphony Hall, Boston) and first (1947, Carnegie Hall, New York, a session that included Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony) and fifth symphonies (1945, Symphony Hall, Boston), were reportedly mastered on Victor's revolutionary sound film optical recording process, first employed in this way with the San Francisco Symphony in March, 1942.
His very last recordings, made in November 1950, on magnetic tape using RCA's proprietary RT-2 1/4-inch machines at 30 inches per second, were acclaimed performances of Sibelius' Second Symphony and Grieg's "The Last Spring". Both have been rereleased by RCA/BMG on CD in Taiwan. Some of Koussevitzky's performances at Tanglewood, including a very spirited Beethoven "Egmont" Overture, were also filmed during the 1940s.
According to Music & Arts Programs of America, a number of the Boston Symphony's 78 rpm recordings with Koussevitzky were issued on the bargain RCA Camden label, originally released at US$1.98 for a 12-inch LP album when similar top-of-the-line Red Seals were selling for US$5.98, in the early 1950s as the "Centennial Symphony Orchestra". One of the later albums featured Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Richard Srauss' "Til Eulenspiegel"; while the orchestra was again listed as the Centennial Symphony -- and the conductor not identified, the narrator, actor Richard Hale, inexplicably, was. Koussevitzky ultimately rerecorded the piece in Tanglewood with Eleanor Roosevelt during the summer of 1950 on magnetic tape; issued on three 45's and a 10-inch LP, it has never been rereleased in spite of the popularity of the Camden disc with Hale. Hale was also the narrator for Arthur Fiedler's 1953 RCA recording of the same music with the Boston Pops. RCA often reissued historic recordings from the RCA Victor catalog on its Camden label with fictitious orchestral names to avoid having them in direct competition with newer recordings by the same artists on RCA Victor's upscale Red Seal label.
Notable premieres
In concert
- Scriabin, Prometheus: Poem of Fire, Moscow, March 2, 1911
- Ravel's orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Paris, October 19, 1922
- Prokofiev, First Violin Concerto with Marcel Darrieux as soloist, Paris, October 18, 1923
- Prokofiev, Second Symphony, Paris, June 6 1925
- Prokofiev, Fourth Symphony, Boston, November 14, 1930
- George Gershwin, Second Rhapsody, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Hall, Boston, 29 January 1932
- Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, New York, December 1, 1944
- Samuel Barber, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Eleanor Steber as soloist, Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1948
- Copland Appalachian Spring (suite) Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1945
On record
- Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Boston Symphony Orchestra, October 1930
- Sibelius, Seventh Symphony, BBC Symphony Orchestra, HMV, London, 1933
- Roy Harris, Third Symphony, Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1939
- Berlioz, Harold in Italy with William Primrose as soloist, 1946
- Copland, Appalachian Spring (suite), Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1946
- Haydn, Symphony No 94 In G (The "Surprise" Symphony), Boston Symphony Orchestra
See also
External links
- at the Koussevitzky Music Foundations
- at the Koussevitzky Recordings Society
- at the American Symphony Orchestra
- at the Bach Cantatas Website
- A film about Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie. commissioned by the Koussevitzky foundation.
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