My travels through conductors continues. This week, it is Serge Koussevitsky. Koussevitzky was a major 20th-century conductor who shaped American classical music. He was the Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he founded the Tanglewood Music Center, he was a champion of modern composers like Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland, and he was a key supporter of new works, including Copland’s Symphony No. 3.
I have posted two pieces conducted by Koussevitsky: the second of Grieg’s pieces from his Two Elegiac Melodies, Op. 34. I have also included Tchaikovsky’s Symphony 6 “Pathétique”. This piece is long, but it is well worth the listen.
Serge Koussevitsky
July [O.S. July 14] 26, 1874 – June 4, 1951
Koussevitzky was born into a poor but musical family: the first musical instrument he learned to play was the trumpet. He won a scholarship to the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied the double-bass. Having joined the double-bass section of the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, Moscow, in 1894, he was principal from 1901 to 1905 and also started his career as a soloist in 1901, with a repertoire that consisted predominantly of transcriptions, many made by himself, of works originally composed for the cello. After moving to Berlin in 1907, Koussevitsky studied conducting at the High School for Music and saw Nikisch in action, making his conducting debut during the following year with no less an orchestra than the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, which he had hired for the purpose.
Upon returning to Moscow in 1909, Koussevitsky founded both this own orchestra and a publishing company, Les Éditions russes de musique, which favored the most prominent young Russian composers of the time such as Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Glazunov. With his orchestra, he undertook three summer tours down the River Volga in 1910, 1912, and 1914. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Koussevitsky accepted the offer of the post of chief conductor of the State Symphony Orchestra in Petrograd (which later became the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra), but left Russia in 1920 and following brief periods in Berlin and Rome, he settled with his wife in Paris. Here he founded and conducted between 1921 and 1924, the Concerts Koussevitsky, the orchestra that was made up of the finest instrumentalists in the city: its repertoire included the music of many contemporary Russian and French composers. He was invited to become the chief conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1924, and he held this post for twenty-five years, until 1949; although his true home remained Paris until 1939, and he resided in America only for the concert season. With the outbreak of World War II, however, he made America his base and took American citizenship.
As previously in Russia and France, Koussevitsky quickly became a staunch proponent of the young composers in his new country, commissioning important works from Copland, Harris, Piston, Barber, Hanson, Schuman, and Bernstein. In addition, he created the Tanglewood Music Festival in 1935, and in 1940, the Berkshire Music Center, which soon became a highly influential establishment for advanced musical study. Koussevitsky himself taught the conducting classes there, his students including Frederick Fennell, Lukas Foss, and Leonard Bernstein; he retained the direction of the Center after relinquishing the conductorship of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. To preserve the memory of his wife, who died in 1942, he founded the Koussevitsky Foundation to commission and fund the performance of new works. Among the Foundation’s most well-known early commissions were Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Messiaen’s Turangalla-Symphonie, and Benjamin Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes.
During his twenty-five years with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Koussevitsky raised it to become one of the very finest orchestras in the world.
Taken from A-Z of Conductors, by David Patmore