Grade 1 Violin

    A great conductor who was to fall foul of US officaldom was the half-Jewish Josef Krips . Having managed to survive the war in Vienna with the utmost difficulty he has hauled out of a cellar by the Russians and asked to re-establish the Vienna Opera and Vienna Philharmonic. This he did brilliantly and was invited to conduct in America. Arriving at Ellis Island he was asked if he had ever been a member of the Nazi or Communist party. He answered that the only party he would subscribe to was the Mozart party. For this he and his wife were incarcerated on Ellis Island and eventually sent back to Europe. Years later Harry Truman's daughter attended a concert of Krips with the LSO and invited him to her box at the Festival Hall in the interval. In that way, Krips knew that only then would it be OK for him to apply again for a visa to enter the USA.

    A story related to me by Gennady Rozhdestvensky about George Szell conducting the Leningrad Phil between the wars. There was a principal 'cellist called Brick who specialised in asking conductors questions to which there was no answer. He started asking Szell such questions in a rehearsal and Szell immediately realised what was going on so he called for a break and sent for Brick. Brick came to his room - a connoiseeur of such situations. Szell asked him if he knew how many string quartets Haydn had written. Brick guessed something like 80 but Szell told him it was 83. He asked him to select one of the string quartets. Brick wasn't sure what he meant so Szel said just choose a number between 1 and 83. So Brick - somewhat mystified - said 56. Szell then asked him to choose a movement of Haydn's 56th String Quartet and so Brik said 3rd movement. Szell then said 'choose an insrument' so being a 'cellist, Brick said ''cello'. Szell went o...

    Mark Ermler was eventually Chief Conductor at the Bolshoi. Orchestras adored him because he had a brain like a computer but was very sweet with it. He told me once that if he needed to work on some problem in rehearsal he would try to fix it twice and if they still couldn't manage it he would just move on! He could be absolutely inspired but he could also just be on auto-pilot. His tragedy was that he recognised this but he didn't know how to turn on the inspiration.

    He was a dear person and a brilliant conductor under the right circumstances. These included working in the studio with Erik Smith as producer. All those early Verdi recordings for Philips were made under those circumstances. It was an ideal partnership. Erik was a very good musician (pianist) and I think he was able to realize his conducting ambitions through Lamberto such was his interventionist style of production to which to give him credit Lamberto responded positively. He worked with Mascagni and was Serafin's assistant in his youth. He left Italy because he had been persecuted by the Fascists before and during the war and then by the Communists after it. He went to Sweden and worked at the Stockholm Opera as well as the Royal Danish Opera. I have a recording of him conducting Bjorling in Pagliacci in Stockholm in the early 50's. I heard that he was the natural son of the son of the Chief Rabbi of Venice and an Italian girl. The (natural) father committed s...

  I had the great good fortune to hear and see him conduct 'Elektra', 'Boheme' and 'Otello' at Covent Garden. In fact, being 'in the business' (an agent) I provided Jeffrey Lawton for that Otello performance which otherwise would not have taken place, Domingo having cancelled at the last minute.  All the arrangements for Jeffrey Lawton were made with the artistic admin department so I still to this day have no idea how it played with C.K. I read somewhere he said he didn't want to lose the fee for this performance but maybe he was joking. Jeffrey Lawton's voice was not very pretty and he was a big lad but he had sung the role in Peter Stein's fantastic production for Welsh National Opera many times so knew his way around it and sang and acted it very well. He told me C.K. told him just to do what he normally did and he would follow him. That's what happened and it was a great performance - certainly the highpoint of Jeff...

    I once had a meeting with Wolfgang Stresemann . It must have been in the early '70s soon after I had begun agenting. I had an opposite number in Germany then, called Andreas von Bennigsen. Andreas and I decided we were going to try to persuade Stresemann to engage a conductor of mine called Lamberto Gardelli. I remember entering Stresemann 's office at the Philharmonie with Andreas and seeing the expression of absolute shock on Stresemann 's face. We were not wearing ties! Needless to say Gardelli didn't get a date with the orchestra on that or any other occasion and we were toast. I recently read two books by Stresemann. They are interesting. He was a sort of failed pianist conductor himself and had some interesting apercus on the musical world. He tells the story of Toscanini's last concert when the maestro had a memory lapse during the Tannhauser overture I believe. The orchestra stopped playing immediately. Stresemann spoke later to one of the mu...

  I met Celi twice. First I went to see him in Stockholm in the early '70s. He had invited me to a rehearsal. The Swedish Radio Orchestra was rehearsing a section from the Pastoral Symphony, 2nd movement (Scene by the brook) and after the interval the coda of the last movement of Dvorak's 'cello concerto - that's all. I was astonished by the 'scene painting' of the Beethoven - I'd never heard anything like it. I approached Celi in the interval. he welcomed me graciously but said I should see him after the rehearsal because during the break he had to sit in the auditorium to be available to any player who might have a question for him. This he did and indeed a player or two came to talk to him. After the rehearsal, he spoke to me in his dressing room. I asked him under what conditions he would give a concert in London. He said that London was a black mark on the map because 'you could have had the greatest orchestra in the world but chose t...

 Everyone knows Beethoven wrote only one opera, Fidelio. Considering it started life as 'Leonore' which itself underwent a revision, one might almost say he wrote three operas, all on the same subject. It has been said that Bruckner wrote 23 symphonies - a fanciful pronouncement including as it does revisions made by others. My point about Leonore/Fidelio is that it obviously meant a very great deal indeed to Beethoven. He stated that the revision which took the final Leonore and created the Fidelio we know today was the most difficult thing he had ever done. This from the arch-revisor, revision being an integral part of his compositional process. In Wikipedia, we read No other work of Beethoven caused him so much frustration and disappointment. He found the difficulties posed by writing and producing an opera so disagreeable, he never attempted to compose another. In a letter to Treitschke he said, "I assure you, dear Treitschke, that this opera will win me a martyr...

Arthur Goldschmidt, Conductor, (1902 – 1970). Early life. Fritz Nathan Jakob, also Arthur Goldschmidt was born on the 13 th January, 1902 in Berlin. After attending Gymnasium, he studie d at University and at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Musik w here his teacher s included Walter Fischer, Organist of the Berliner Dom and Leo Blech, then General Music Director of the Berlin Staatsoper. In 1922, he became Blech’s assistant at the Staatsoper and then Ko r repet i tor at the Deutsche Oper, Charlottenburg to which Blech had briefly moved . His duties there included conducting the off-stage band and playing Celesta in the orchestra, principally for perfor m a n ces of ‘Der Rosenkavalier.’ Engagement in Braunschweig and other musical activities in 1922 and 1923 In 1922, Goldschmidt had an engagement as Kapellmeister at the Staat stheater Braunschweig co nducting opera and operetta. He is also recorded as having conducted Lehar’s ‘Frasquita’ at the Thalia Theatre...

  Gennady Rozhdestvensky I had the honour to represent the great conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky from 1984 until his death on June 16th, 2018. I also had the pleasure of attending his concerts and performances from 1962-on when as a teenager I heard him conduct the Western premiere of Shostakovich’s 4th symphony at the Edinburgh Festival with the Philharmonia Orchestra. An unforgettable experience. Rozhdestvensky was interested in art. He was the only great musician I have met who knew all visual art, theatre, film and literature as well as music. He regarded all art as one. This immense culture informed all his performances and was a part of what made him one of the greatest conductors of his day or any day. He didn’t possess a mobile phone or computer but had a library so extensive as to require a second flat in his building in Moscow. His answer to a question as to whether he knew some particularly obscure symphony by some unknown composer would be ‘which versi...