Skip to main content

George szell Biography

George Szell

(Budapest, 1897-Cleveland, 1970) Hungarian American pianist, composer and conductor.A child prodigy, he gave his first concert at the young age of ten with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.He studied in Vienna under Richard Robert, Eusebius Mandyczewski and Karl Prohaska, and in Leipzig under Max Reger.

At age 17 he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance in which one of his symphonic poems, Till Eulenspiegel , was performed.Richard Strauss took him to the Berlin Opera as his assistant; He stayed there between 1914 and 1917, when Strauss recommended Szell to succeed Otto Klemperer as the first conductor of the Strasbourg opera; He held this position from 1917 to 1919.

Subsequently, Szell was director in various centers, such as the German Theater in Prague, between 1919 and 1921, the Berlin Broadcastin Company, between 1921 and 1929, Darmstadt between 1921 and 1922, and Düsseldorf, where he was from 1922 to 1924; later he was appointed principal conductor of the Berlin Opera, a position he held between 1924 and 1929.At the same time he was conducting the Radio Symphony Orchestra and teaching at the Berlin School of Music (1927-1930).

In 1930 he conducted the San Luis Symphony Orchestra, and also attended as a guest conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra of Glasgow (Great Britain) and the Residential Orchestra of The Hague (Holland).When World War II broke out, Szell was in Australia.He returned to the United States invited by Arturo Toscanini to conduct the famous NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York.His performance attracted so much attention that he was soon showered with offers to conduct other orchestras, including the Cleveland Orchestra.He combined this activity with the teacher, at the Mannes School in New York.Between 1940 and 1942 he performed chamber music with Paul Hindemith and Rudolf Serkin.

Between 1942 and 1946 he was one of the regular conductors of the Metropolitan Opera House, before taking the leadership of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1946, a position in which he continued until 1971; in this period he managed to turn this orchestra into one of the best in the world.In 1946 he adopted American citizenship.As a conductor, his authoritarian character was not well received by the members of the orchestras, but he brought extraordinary results to some of them.He was a guest conductor at the main European music festivals, including those of Vienna, Salzburg, Milan, Paris, Florence and Lucerne.Among his compositions are the Variations for Orchestra, the Symphony in D Minor, the Lyric Overture and several pieces of chamber music.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Arthur Penn Biography

Arthur Penn (Philadelphia, 1922-New York, 2010) American film director.After World War II he joined a theater company as an actor and attended drama classes at the Actor's Studio; in 1951 he entered the NBC television network as a program manager.In 1958 he made his first film, El lezurdo ; the cold reception he received at its premiere meant a temporary brake on his film career, but he prospered as a theater director in Broadway plays.In 1962 he returned to the cinema with The Miracle of Ana Sullivan, a film for which Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke won Oscars.In 1964 he suffered a new setback with Acosado (1965), while La huría humana (1966), with Marlon Brando, was received with divided opinions.His next film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), was a resounding success, finally achieving his talent.Like Bonnie and Clyde , some of his other films address the past in terms applicable to the present, and his films of the 1960s are regarded by many as the most relevant American work...

Antoni Clavé Biography

Antoni Clavé (Barcelona, ​​1913-Saint Tropez, 2005) Spanish painter and sculptor.A disciple of the sculptor Ángel Ferrant and the painter José Mongrell, he began painting at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona and his foray into the professional field was produced through poster design, mainly cinematographic.Affiliated with the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, in January 1939 he went into exile to France, where he spent time in a refugee camp.He continued his pictorial activities, forming, together with a group of Spanish painters, the so-called School of Paris. In 1941 he set up his first Montparnasse studio.His emotional stability and the birth of his son gave rise to a series of intimate paintings, some of them tending towards abstraction.It did not take long for him to produce paintings with a marked expressionist and even cubist character, in which he systematically and especially dealt with the collage technique, from which the assemblages later derived. ...

Antoni Rubió i Lluch Biography

Antoni Rubió i Lluch (Valladolid, 1856-Barcelona, ​​1937) Catalan historian and scholar.He studied at the University of Barcelona, ​​where he was a student of Milà and Fontanals.Doctor in 1878, in 1885 he succeeded his teacher in the chair of History of Literature at the University of the Catalan capital, from which he formed several generations of disciples, until his retirement in 1928.From 1908 he also held the chair of Catalan literature founded by the Catalan University Studies. He collaborated assiduously.in Catalan and Spanish, in the main academic publications in Barcelona.He was a member of the Institute of Catalan Studies.His trips to Italy and Greece put him in contact with the documentary and monumental sources of the history of these peoples in relation to that of Catalonia and especially with that of the period of Catalan-Aragonese domination in the Duchy of Athens.As a tutor and literary critic, he methodized the teaching of the history of Castilian literature. Am...

Celine dion Biography

Celine Dion (Charlemagne, Quebec, 1968) French-Canadian pop singer.She made her debut on stage when she was five years old, performing traditional Canadian songs, and at twelve she recorded her first demo.Her presentation was La voix du bon Dieu , in 1981, the year in which another work with Christmas songs also appeared.During the eighties she published several records in French, and in 1988 she won the Eurovision Song Contest representing France. 1990 was the year of release of their first album in English, Unison , which contained the singles "(If there was) any other way" and "Where does my heart beat now ".Two years later he released the album Celine Dion , which included the title track (Oscar and Grammy winner) from the movie Beauty and the Beast , one of the Walt Disney's most successful empire productions in which Celine sang in duet with American vocalist Peabo Bryson. Celine Dion Despite her triumph in the Anglo-Saxon market, she did not ...

Arthur Adamov Biography

Arthur Adamov (Kislovodsk, 1908-Paris, 1970) French-language playwright, founder of the theater of the absurd.He left Russia when he was only four years old.He studied in Switzerland, first, and then in Germany.In 1924 he moved to Paris, where he began to frequent surrealist environments.In this period he published some poetry, but immediately stopped writing, until 1946, when he published a heartbreaking and provocative little book, L'aveu , a ruthless analysis of his psychological and spiritual crisis.A year later, under the influence of Strindberg, he wrote his first theatrical text, La parodie . From 1946 to 1955 he developed the themes of what critics called New theater of isolation or Theater of the absurd , and he became an exponent of avant-garde drama, expressing in his texts the discomfort of the individual in the face of the structures imposed by society.Through his characters, lacking a precise psychological individuality, he configured impersonal dramas cross...

Elijah Querejeta Biography

Elías Querejeta (Elías Querejeta Gárate; Hernani, 1930-Madrid, 2013) Spanish film producer.He studied chemistry and law, while at the same time he was part of the Real Sociedad de San Sebastián football team, a career he abandoned at the age of 24.He was a regular at the screenings held by the city's film clubs, where he met other young people-Víctor Erice, Antonio Eceiza-who would study at the Official Film School of Madrid. Elías Querejeta In 1961 he founded his first company, Laponia Films, at the same time that he collaborated with other production companies on his first films.After directing several short films, in 1964 he decided to found Elías Querejeta P.C.From his first films, he defined the style he wanted to print in his works, intervening in almost all of them as co-screenwriter, while gathering around him a group of professionals who would guarantee the finish of each film (Luis Cuadrado and Teo Escamilla as directors photography; Primitivo Álvaro, in the produc...

Enrico Caruso Biography

Enrico Caruso (Naples, 1873-id., 1921) Italian tenor considered the best of his time and one of the greatest in history.Enrico Caruso made his debut in his hometown in 1894, although it was in Milan that he achieved his first great success in 1898 with the interpretation of the opera Fedora , by Umberto Giordano. Enrico Caruso His tours took him around the world, with performances in Saint Petersburg, Rome, Lisbon and Monte Carlo, where he excelled in his magnificent interpretation of La bohème by Giacomo Puccini, accompanied by Australian soprano Nellie Melba.With his fame firmly established, he made his debut in 1902 at London's Covent Garden with Rigoletto by Verdi, an opera that he also performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1903, with extraordinary success.The beauty and strength of her voice won over the Metropolitan audience. His cheerful and outgoing character, his dramatic talent on stage and an almost perfect tenor voice, with a superb powe...

Josep Guinovart Biography

Josep Guinovart (Barcelona, ​​1927-2007) Spanish painter.At fourteen years of age he began working as a wall painter, later entering Llotja.In 1948 he held his first exhibition at the Syra Galleries in Barcelona, ​​dedicating himself entirely to painting from 1951.A year later, after having contacted the avant-garde group Dau al Set (in the illustration of some of whose magazines he came to collaborate ), he obtained a scholarship to study in Paris. Josep Guinovart Upon his return, Josep Guinovart strengthened his ties with some members of Dau al Set (Joan Brossa, Joan Ponç, Modest Cuixart, Antoni Tàpies and Joan Josep Tharrats, among others) and was actively engaged in commissioning mural art, decorations and figurines for theatrical works, illustration works, poster design, etc.His scenographic creations include those of works by Federico García Lorca such as Bodas de Sangre , and among his illustrations are perhaps particularly significant those of the book Poesies by Salv...

Frédéric August Bartholdi Biography

Frédéric August Bartholdi (Colmar, 1834-Paris, 1904) French sculptor.He studied architecture in his hometown and later traveled to Paris to study painting; there he came into contact with the painter Ary Scheffer and the sculptors Jean-François Soitoux and Antoine Étex.He soon concentrated his efforts on sculpture, the art for which he would be best known.His works are characterized by monumentality and by large-scale commemorative pieces of historical and patriotic events.He also made works in honor of well-known personalities of the time. Inspired by the Lion of Lucerne , (1819-1821, Lucerne) monument erected in honor of the Swiss Guards of Louis XVI by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), Bartholdi erected the gigantic Lion of Belfort (1880, Belfort).Although it was created for the cemetery in which the soldiers lay, it was placed on top of a hill from where you can see the entire city.The lion, which rises imposingly to repel the enemy's attack, contrasts with the dejected f...