Mitropoulos in the Late Nineteenth Century

Having examined the recordings in Sony Classical’s Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection that account for the early nineteenth century and the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, I found that the recordings of music from the remainder of the nineteenth century amounted to a rather mixed bag. For the most part, the recordings made with the Minnesota Orchestra outnumber those made with the New York Philharmonic. However, after Mitropoulos moved to New York, he also served as a conductor for the Metropolitan Opera; and, as a result, there are recordings of both Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera.

My guess is that Mitropoulos had more opportunities to be adventurous in Minneapolis. Thus, while we have a recording of the familiar D minor symphony by César Franck, we have less-encountered alternatives such as Ernest Chausson’s Opus 20 symphony in B-flat major and Alexander Borodin’s second symphony in B minor. There is also an opportunity to listen to the pianist Egon Petri as soloist in a performance of Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangement for piano and orchestra of Franz Liszt’s “Rhapsodie espagnole.” Somewhat ironically, while Gustav Mahler performed as a conductor in New York, the recording of Mitropoulos conducting his first symphony was made in Minneapolis, leading me to wonder whether this may have been a “first contact” experience for the Minnesotans.

The New York recordings are fewer in number and leave less of an impression, particularly when Mitropoulos revisits repertoire he had conducted in Minneapolis. While his approach to Boris seemed to be an attentive one, the Met recording was so abridged as to leave almost no sense of the narrative behind the opera. The recording was made at the Metropolitan Opera House in March of 1956, which seems to date from a period when knowledge of the Russian language was not prerequisite. Thus, the excerpts were sung in an English translation that never rises above the level of clunky.

Far more interesting is the Saturday afternoon radio broadcast of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, which took place on December 10, 1955. This was the production at which, earlier in the year, Marian Anderson had made her Met debut in the role of Ulrica. Sony Classical’s Beyond the Music Anderson anthology included the CD of the RCA recording of excerpts from this production, but Anderson can only be heard on one track! That CD is also included in the Mitropoulos collection, but the last two CDs are devoted to reproducing that subsequent radio broadcast. This does far more justice to Anderson, not to mention her colleagues on the stage, which included Giorgio Tozzi, Roberta Peters, Jan Peerce, Robert Merrill, James McCracken, and Zinka Milanov!

If the overall scope of this portion of the Mitropoulos anthology is limited in its eyebrow-raising moments, it is worth noting that, in the overall catalog, his commitment to recording was much more concerned with the twentieth century. Indeed, I have decided that the repertoire is too extensive to be covered by a single article. Instead, I shall write separate articles about music composed in Europe and works that originated in the United States. Mitropoulos was serious about both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and I am hoping to do justice to his dedication to this repertoire.