Towards the end of last month, Sony Classical released its latest historically-significant anthology of past recordings. The title of the release is Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection. To the extent that he is known at all in our current history-is-bunk culture, Mitropoulos is probably best known as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic that took on Leonard Bernstein as a protégé. Mitropoulos began his association with that orchestra in 1949, becoming full-time Music Director in 1951. In 1958 he “passed the baton” (literally) to Bernstein. The album covers all of the recordings Mitropoulos made for Columbia with the Philharmonic, as well as recordings made during his tenure with the Minnesota Orchestra (then the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra) from 1937 to 1949, when he was succeeded by Antal Doráti. (An anthology of Doráti in Minneapolis would probably be as extensive and informative as the Mitropoulos anthology.)
When Mitropoulos first moved to New York, he shared the Philharmonic podium with Leopold Stokowski. Like Stokowski, he had adventurous tastes in repertoire. However, Stokowski was more of a showman, satisfying his audience with familiar favorites while maintaining a judicious balance of tastes when venturing into the unknown. Mitropoulos was bolder in departing from tradition; and the selections of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven in this new collection are extremely modest, particularly when compared with anthologies of other conductors discussed on this site.
One result is that only two of those composers, Mozart and Beethoven, enjoy the benefit of full-album recordings. Ironically, the Mozart album does not feature either of the Minneapolis and New York ensembles. Rather, the focus is on the duo-pianists Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin performing the K. 365 two-piano concerto and the K. 242 three-piano concerto joined by Josef Lhévinne. The ensembles for these performances are, respectively, the Robin Hood Dell Orchestra (the “summer version” of the Philadelphia Orchestra, named for its outdoor venue) and The Little Orchestra Society conducted by Thomas Scherman. (This is clearly a Vronsky-Babin album, rather than a Mitropoulos album; but it is still a useful document of performance practices in the post-WWII Forties.) That said, Mitropoulos was clearly sensitive to the breadth of Mozart’s rhetorical skills; and, while these are not “historically-informed” performances, they still shine a more-than-favorable light on Mozart.
Beethoven definitely gets more attention. There is a recording of the Opus 68 (“Pastoral”) symphony made in Minneapolis and a Philharmonic recording of the Opus 73 (“Emperor”) concerto with the Philharmonic and pianist Robert Casadesus. There is also a memorial album for Casadesus’ son Jean, who died in a car crash at the age of 45. This couples a Philharmonic performance of Beethoven’s Opus 37 (third) concerto in C minor with a solo piano performance of Mozart’s K. 573 set of nine variations on a minuet theme by Jean-Pierre Duport.
Bach, on the other hand, is limited to arrangements of organ music for large orchestral ensembles. The selections are the BWV 564 C major toccata (arranged by Leo Weiner), Mitropoulos’ own arrangement of the BWV 542 fantasia and fugue in G minor, and the BWV 680 chorale prelude setting of “Wir glauben all an einen Gott” arranged by “H. Bösenroth.” Finally, as a brief nod to seventeenth-century France, BWV 564 is followed by a minuet movement from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s ballet Le temple de la paix (the temple of peace). All these recordings we made during Mitropoulos’ tenure in Minnesota.
While these selections are limited, one should not assume that Mitropoulos was only comfortable out on the “bleeding edge.” For example, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky gets roughly the same attention as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven combined; and Mitropoulos was certainly generous in his overall repertoire from the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, his heart was very much in the twentieth century, both in Europe and the United States. Future articles will discuss each of these domains in its own right.
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