This week, I am posting a piece by Scriabin conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. I am also posting a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Dimitri Mitropoulos was a Greek-born conductor, pianist, and composer who rose from early studies in Athens, Brussels, and Berlin to an international conducting career. He championed contemporary and unfamiliar repertoire, built major success with the Minneapolis Symphony, and later led the New York Philharmonic despite critical resistance, managerial pressures, and health problems. He also became an admired opera conductor, and later reissues of his recordings helped restore recognition of his intense, highly individual artistry.
Mitropoulos was a wonderful conductor, and he could extract great performances from the orchestras that he conducted. I hope that you enjoy this posting.
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 in F minor, opus 36
First Movement
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 in F minor, opus 36
Second Movement
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 in F minor, opus 36
Third Movement
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 in F minor, opus 36
Fourth Movement
Dimitri Mitropoulos
March 1, [O.S. February 18,] 1896 – November 12, 1960
Mitropoulos showed musical talent from an early age: at ten years old, he was writing and playing his own compositions. His aptitude was noted by a member of the staff of the Athens Conservatory who encouraged him to pursue his musical studies. His family was religious; several of his relatives being priests of the Greek Orthodox church. Mitropoulos too considered becoming a priest, but the absence of music in the Greek Orthodox liturgy decided him in favor of music, and he joined the Athens Conservatory, where he studied piano. He graduated in piano in 1918 and in composition in 1920. While still a student he composed a symphonic poem entitled La mise au tombeau de Christ and his opera, Soeur Beatrice, based on the text by Maeterlinck, was performed at the Conservatory in 1920. Saint-Saens was shown the score and later wrote favorably about it in a French journal. Mitropoulos was awarded a scholarship to study at the Brussels Conservatory with Paul Gilson during 1920 and 1921, after which he studied with Busoni in Berlin at the High School for Music until 1924. While in Berlin, he also conducted as a substitute at the Berlin State Opera on Busoni’s recommendation.
After his return to Greece from 1924 onwards Mitropoulos conducted the Athens Conservatory Orchestra (which later became the Greek State Symphony Orchestra), exerting a major influence upon Greek musical taste by introducing into his programs numerous previously unfamiliar and contemporary works. He was appointed professor of composition at the Conservatory in 1930, and in 1931, he was elected a member of the Athens Academy. His international reputation was established in 1930 when, substituting for Egon Petri, who was ill, he both conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and played the solo part in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, a feat which he repeated in Paris and London in 1932. Mitropoulos toured Italy in 1933, and, during the following year, he appeared in France, Italy, Belgium, Poland, and Russia; he also appeared frequently in Monte Carlo and in 1935 was the guest conductor of the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris.
In 1936, Mitropoulos was invited by Serge Kossevitsky to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra and once again he enjoyed enormous success. The following year, he appeared for the first time at the head of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, again to great acclaim; and when the orchestra’s chief conductor, Eugene Ormandy, moved on to take over the Philadelphia Orchestra from Leopold Stowkowski in 1938, Mitropoulos was appointed as chief conductor. He moved to Minneapolis, where he lived simply. He became a popular local figure, and with no other permanent appointments to distract him, he entered whole-heartedly into encouraging amateur musick-making in the community, in addition to his work with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, where he programed numerous contemporary works and gradually built up audiences to very high levels. In the same year, the orchestra was contracted to the American Columbia label and made the first commercial recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, among other works. Mitropoulos appeared in New York with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1939 and with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time during its 1940-1941 season. He took American citizenship in 1946, and, for the 1949-1950 season shared the chief conductorship of the New York Philharmonic with Stokowski.
At the end of the season, Mitropoulos was offered the post of chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic. As recordings of the broadcasts of many of his concerts with ensemble clearly demonstrate, Mitropoulos was capable of driving the orchestra to unaccustomed heights, but, at the same time, he had a number of difficulties to contend with. His personality was gentle and non-combative, was ill-suited to dealing with the toughness of the players in the orchestra, and with the manipulative working style of Arthur Judson, its manager. Mitropoulos was frequently attacked by New York critics, who disliked his programing, which, at its best, focused on late-romantic and modern European music, rather than the staple of the traditional Austro-German repertoire and contemporary American music. His austere way of life and rumored homosexuality fitted poorly with the McCarthyite mass psychology of the period. Not surprisingly in these circumstances, Mittropoulos’s days were soon numbered, and his predicament was worsened by cardiac health problems; these ultimately proved fatal. Following the unexpected death in 1956 of Guido Cantelli, who had been viewed as a potential successor, Leonard Bernstein openly campaigned for Mitropoulos’s position. As had been the case previously with Stowkowski, Mitropulos was invited to share the chief conductorship with Bernstein for the 1957-1958 season; this was his last with the New York Philharmonic, and Bernstein took over as sole chief conductor with effect from the 1958-1959 season.
Despite these difficulties, Mitropoulos was steadily building an enviable reputation as a conductor of opera, as well as of symphonic music, both in Europe and America. He conducted productions of works such as Richard Strauss’s Elektra, Verdi’s Ernani, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and Puccini’s La Fanciulla de West at La Scala, Milan, the Maggio Musical in Florence, the Salzburg Festival, the Chicago Lyric Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Once again, the recordings of these and many other works clearly demonstrate Mitropoulos’s great authority and sill as an operatic conductor. From 1954 he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera, becoming principal conductor in 1958. He was invited to open the Metropolitan Opera’s 1958-1959 season with a new production of Puccini’s Tosca starring Renata Tebaldi and Mario del Monaco; while in Vienna, the musicians of the Vienn Philharmonic Orchestra were astounded that their colleagues in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra had sought to remove him as their chief conductor. At the beginning of 1959, Mitropoulos suffered his first heart attack and was advised by his doctors to rest. However, was soon back on the podium, conducting both in America
Following his death, Mitropoulos’s recordings rapidly vanished from sight. His reputation was not helped by the fact that his departure from the New York Philharmonic coincided with the end of the mono era in recording. Bernstein’s recordings appeared in the new medium of stereo, which eclipsed for a while all that had gone before and attracted major press coverage, leaving older recordings very much on the sidelines. It was only with the gradual re-publication of broadcast recordings of opera and concert performances, especially in Italy and Greece that Mitropoulos’s true stature as a musician began to be fully assessed and appreciated. His commercia discography is naturally centered upon his work in Minneapolis and New York. Although the overall quality of Mitropoulos’s studio recordings is extremely high, nevertheless, to gain an even fuller understanding of this prodigious musician, it is necessary to turn to the recordings of his live performances. In these above all else, Mitropoulos’s highly personal musical character is fully apparent throughout, and his extraordinary ability to animate to the highest degree all the music that he conducted.
From Conductors A to A by David Patmore