Kocian Quartet, Prague Wind Quintet, London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Monteux
Biography Kocian Quartet, Prague Wind Quintet, London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Monteux
Ivan Klansky
The outstanding Czech pianist and pedagogue Ivan Klánský is a graduate of Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts. Early on he won honours in prestigious international competitions—in Bolzano in 1967, Naples 1968, Leipzig 1968, Warsaw 1970, Barcelona 1970, Fort Worth 1973, and Santander 1976. He concertizes regularly in Europe, Asia, Australia, the United States, and South America, with the total number of his appearances now approaching five thousand. He is also a sought-after performer in chamber music, whose name has long been associated with the superb Guarneri Trio of Prague. His playing is complemented by extraordinarily successful work as a teacher. Since 1983 he has been a professor at the Academy of Performing Arts, where since 1997 he has headed the Keyboard Department. Since 1991 he has been a professor at the College of Music in Lucerne, Switzerland as well, having also led master classes in Dublin (1982 to 1986) and Bad Saulgau (starting 1997).
Hugh Maguire
Irish violinist Andrew Hugh Michael Maguire was born in Dublin on 2 August 1926. His father was a schoolteacher with a remarkable gift for music. Hugh began violin lessons at six, and had won all the major Irish music festivals' prizes by the age of twelve. He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London, winning prizes for violin playing and quartet playing. He owed the greatest debt to George Enescu, with whom he studied in Paris for ten months.
He became leader of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Charles Groves in 1952. After a short period as sub-leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he served as leader of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1956 until 1961, brought in as one of a number of youngsters to reshape the orchestra after a bust-up between players and management. During this time he played in various recordings for Antal Doráti, and became a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music.
In 1962, he handed his LSO job to Eric Gruenberg and became leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra until 1967. He became more involved with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and with chamber groups such as the Allegri Quartet and the Melos Ensemble, and taught at the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies, as Director of String Studies. He was also professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London, artistic director of the Irish Youth Orchestra and violin tutor to the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.
Pierre Monteux
was born into a musical family: his mother, Madame Monteux-Brissac, taught at the Paris Conservatoire, and his elder brother Paul began to teach him to play the violin when he was six. Three years later he entered the Conservatoire where he studied violin, harmony and counterpoint. Having first conducted when he was twelve, from 1890 Monteux was a violist in the orchestras of the Opéra-Comique and of the Concerts Colonne. He was appointed assistant conductor and choirmaster of the Colonne Orchestra in 1894, the year in which he joined the Geloso Quartet, with whom he played a string quartet by Brahms with the composer present. He was awarded first prize at the Conservatoire for his violin-playing, together with Jacques Thibaud, in 1896; and as an orchestral player Monteux was a participant in the golden age of Massenet and Debussy, for instance playing in the first performances of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
Between 1908 and 1914 Monteux conducted operas, operettas and concerts at the Dieppe Casino, where he also looked after balls and other musical events. He founded his own Concerts Berlioz in Paris in 1911, the year in which he left the Geloso Quartet and that in which his first major opportunity as a conductor occurred. Stravinsky’s new ballet Petrushka was in rehearsal by the Ballets Russes, but the conductor Tcherepnin had fallen ill and Stravinsky, looking for a substitute who could at least rehearse the music, turned to Gabriel Pierné, the chief conductor of the Colonne Orchestra, for advice. Pierné recommended Monteux, who proved to be so good that Stravinsky and Diaghilev entrusted him with the first performance of the new score, which took place on 13 June 1911 in Paris. After this success, Monteux also conducted for Diaghilev’s company the first performances of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912) and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913). He went on to conduct at the Paris Opera, and at Covent Garden in London, as well as in Budapest and Vienna; and in 1914 he established another concerts series in Paris, La Société des Concerts Populaires.
During World War I Monteux was a member of the French army, and saw military action at Verdun and elsewhere. However he was recalled in 1916 to conduct the Ballets Russes in America, to boost the standing of the Allied war effort, and remained in the USA, conducting the Civic Orchestra Society in New York and the French repertoire at the Metropolitan Opera between 1917 and 1919. He was appointed as chief conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1919 and stayed in this position until 1924 when as a result of labour difficulties within the orchestra he resigned, to be replaced by Koussevitzky. For the next ten years Monteux served as second conductor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra alongside Mengelberg and also conducted the Amsterdam Wagner Society. He did much to promote Dutch music, of which he was a strong supporter (Willem Pijper’s Symphony No. 3 is dedicated to him). During a period of absence by Stokowski in 1928, Monteux conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra; and from 1929 to 1938 the Paris Symphony Orchestra, which he founded. Also at this time (in 1932) he established the École Monteux in Paris for the training of young conductors, a preoccupation which he retained until the end of his life. From 1936 until 1952 Monteux was chief conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, establishing it as one of the finest orchestras in the USA and recording with it extensively for RCA (these recordings were among the first to be made in America using magnetic tape). He also assisted with the formation of the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1937, and conducted several of its early concerts.
In 1942 Monteux took American citizenship and transferred the École Monteux to his new home in Hancock, Maine, where Erich Kunzel, Neville Marriner and André Previn were among his students. Following his departure from San Francisco he held no permanent posts for nine years, working entirely as a guest conductor. He appeared frequently with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, then led by Charles Munch, and between 1953 and 1956 at the Metropolitan Opera where he conducted memorable performances of operas from the French repertoire. At the age of eighty-six he accepted in 1961 the position of chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, signing a twenty-five-year contract with an option to renew! In London in 1963 he conducted, in the presence of the composer, a fiftieth anniversary performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to great public acclaim.
Monteux was completely devoted to the task of interpreting the written text, without any hint of self-promotion. He had great respect for orchestral musicians, emphasising always the need for effective collaboration, and conducted with a calm and clear technique, although he was able to generate great tension when required. In his performances he sought to reveal all the inner voices of the score, revealing the influence of his early years as a chamber music player. His recording career extended from 1929 to his death in 1964 and took in all the major technical innovations of this period, from electrical recording to stereophonic sound, which proved to be invaluable in helping to realise his love of orchestral sonority. He understood the recording process more effectively than several of his peers, for example Toscanini and Furtwängler: he was not overly-concerned with technical issues but nonetheless always created recordings that possessed beauty and musical conviction.
The recorded legacy of Monteux, although not as large as that of Ansermet for instance, is nonetheless both catholic and representative in its range. Although his pre-war French recordings have an important documentary interest, it is his recordings with the San Francisco, Boston and London Symphony Orchestras which have the greatest value, together with several with the Concertgebouw and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras. John Culshaw, the producer of one of his finest recordings, of the complete score of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, wrote eloquently about Monteux’s skills as a conductor in relation to this classic recording: ‘It is, and always will be, one of my favourite records, not simply because it happens to be conducted by the man who had been responsible for its première, but because of the way he treated the music, which was to relate each part to its context and to see the work as a whole. Thus he did not allow the climax of the great Levé du jour to become so powerful that there was nothing in reserve when he came to the climaxes at the end of the work.’
