Eugene Ormandy was born Jenő Blau into a musical Jewish family: his father, a dentist, was an amateur violinist, and he named his son after the Hungarian violin virtuoso Jenő Hubay. The boy soon showed signs of musical ability and from an early age was encouraged by his father to practise the violin. He studied at the Royal State Academy of Music in Budapest from the age of five, and with Hubay himself from the age of nine; other teachers included the composers Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály and Leo Weiner. Ormandy was the youngest-ever graduate of the Royal Academy when he received his diploma at the age of fourteen, going on to study philosophy at the University of Budapest from which he graduated when he was twenty, meanwhile also himself teaching at the Royal State Academy of Music from the age of seventeen. During 1917 he toured Hungary and Germany as soloist with the Blüthner Orchestra, and during 1920 France and Austria as a recitalist. Determined to do the same in America, Ormandy arrived there in 1921, only to find that a promised series of concerts had vanished. Down to his last twenty dollars, he auditioned for a place as a violinist in the orchestra of the Capitol Theatre in New York, which showed silent films, and within a year had been promoted to the position of leader of the orchestra. Ormandy’s first experience of conducting came at the Capitol Theatre when in 1924 he substituted for an ailing staff conductor. He continued in this role, for which he clearly had a gift, conducting the same work as often as twenty times in a single week; and became the theatre’s associate music director in 1926, the year in which he became an American citizen, exactly five years and ninety days (the minimum waiting time) after his arrival in the USA. He later remarked in interview that he was ‘…born in New York City at the age of twenty-two’.

Ormandy was spotted at the Capitol Theatre in 1927 by the music agent and orchestral manager Arthur Judson, who took him under his wing and secured guest engagements for him, mainly for radio broadcasts and often for the CBS radio network. During this period Ormandy attended the rehearsals of several of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s major conductors, including Mengelberg and Toscanini, and conducted the orchestra himself during 1930 in some of its Lewisohn Stadium concerts. In 1931 he began his association with the Philadelphia Orchestra after Judson booked him as a last-minute replacement for Toscanini, who was incapacitated by bursitis. The unknown conductor proved to be a more than acceptable alternative and as a result he was engaged to substitute for the conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, Henri Verbrugghen, being appointed soon thereafter as that orchestra’s chief conductor. Ormandy proved to be a vigorous programmer of contemporary music: works by composers such as Berg, Krenek, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Sibelius featured in his programmes. At the same time the unusual orchestral contract then in operation in Minneapolis allowed the orchestra to be recorded at no extra cost, with the result that RCA Victor, which was keen to develop its catalogue of recordings of classical music, recorded Ormandy and the orchestra in an extensive repertoire which featured several of the then-modern works which had appeared in concert performances. These included such pieces as Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 1, as well as large-scale works such as Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’, and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7: both the Bruckner and the Schoenberg were receiving their first recordings. Ormandy quickly became one of the most-recorded American conductors of the period, and thereafter proved to be highly conscious of the importance of recordings in maintaining and broadcasting a reputation.

When Leopold Stokowski decided to reduce his commitment to the Philadelphia Orchestra, Ormandy left the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1936 to become co-conductor with him of the Philadelphia; two years later he was appointed as sole chief conductor, remaining in this position until 1980 and touring often within the USA and abroad with the orchestra (for instance to the United Kingdom in 1949, Japan in 1967 and China in 1973). In addition he accepted guest conducting engagements in Europe. After his retirement from the post of chief conductor in 1980 Ormandy was made the Philadelphia’s conductor laureate, a position which he held until his death, marking the hitherto longest unbroken association between a conductor and a major orchestra. His last concert was with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on 10 January 1984.

With the Philadelphia Orchestra, Ormandy maintained Stokowski’s emphasis upon richness of tone within the string sections, while gradually returning the orchestra to uniform bowing and traditional seating arrangements in contrast to Stokowski’s enthusiasm for free bowing and experiments with layout. He also developed a more conservative approach to repertoire, which often reflected plans for future recordings. Ormandy continued to record with RCA Victor until 1943, after which both he and the Philadelphia entered into a long-term agreement with the American Columbia label, which lasted until 1968. This relationship proved to be extraordinarily productive and it was through their numerous recordings for Columbia that Ormandy’s international fame and that of the Philadelphia Orchestra was developed and maintained. At the same time the inevitable commercial pressures for numerous popular titles, and Ormandy’s willing acceptance of such repertoire ideas, also created an impression of a conductor whose performances at times lacked insight and depth, preferring surface polish to imagination. Although this impression did contain an element of truth, it was not wholly justified, since by contrast Ormandy programmed a significant amount of contemporary American music, by composers such as Barber, Diamond, Hanson, Piston, Schuman, Sessions and John Vincent, and was quite assiduous in performing recently-edited music such as Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 and Bogatirev’s of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 7. After 1968 Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra returned to record for RCA Victor, but not so prolifically as had been the case with Columbia. At the very end of his career Ormandy also recorded for several different labels, such as Delos, EMI and Telarc. His discography was vast: it covered much of the late-Romantic orchestral repertoire and reflected his skill as an accompanist. Contained within it were a relatively large number of notable recordings, some of which are listed above.

Ormandy stands within the group of Hungarian conductors who strongly influenced orchestral life during the twentieth century: other notable representatives of this school included Antal Dorati, Fritz Reiner, Georges Sébastian and Georg Solti. Strongly influenced by Bartók and Kodály, all favoured an interpretational approach that emphasised rhythmic drive and orchestral transparency. The major influence was that of Toscanini and its antithesis was Furtwängler. Ormandy was a shrewd observer and had this to say about his and others’ conducting: ‘My conducting is what it is because I was a violinist. Toscanini was always playing the cello, Koussevitzky the double-bass, Stokowski the organ. The conductors who were pianists nearly always have a sharper, more percussive beat, and it can be heard in their orchestras.’

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).

Mussorgsky was one of the five Russian nationalist composers roughly grouped under the influence of the unreliable Balakirev. Initially an army officer and later, intermittently, a civil servant, Mussorgsky left much unfinished at his death in 1881. Nevertheless, his influence on composers such as Janáček was considerable, not least in the association he found between speech intonations and rhythms and melody.

Rimsky-Korsakov, a musician who had acquired a more conventional technique of orchestration and composition, revised and completed a number of Mussorgsky’s works, versions which now may seem inferior to the innovative original compositions as Mussorgsky conceived them.

Operas

The greatest of Mussorgsky’s creations was the opera Boris Godunov, based on Pushkin and Karamazin, with a thoroughly Russian historical subject. He completed the first version in 1869 and a second version in the 1870s, but it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s version that was first performed outside Russia. The opera provides an important part for a bass in the role of Boris. Other operas by Mussorgsky include Khovanshchina, completed and orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov. A later version by Shostakovich restores more of the original text. The opera Sorochintsy Fair, after Gogol, completed by Lyadov and others, includes the orchestral favourite A Night on the Bare Mountain—an orchestral witches’ sabbath.

Piano Music

Mussorgsky’s 1874 suite Pictures at an Exhibition, a tribute to the versatile artist Hartman, has proved the most popular of all the composer’s works, both in its original version for piano and in colourful orchestral versions, of which Maurice Ravel’s has proved the most generally acceptable. Linked by ‘Promenades’ for the visitor to the exhibition, Mussorgsky represents in music a varied collection, from the ‘Market of Limoges’ and the ‘Catacombs’ to the final ‘Great Gate of Kiev’—a monumental translation into music of an architectural design for a triumphal gateway.

Vocal Music

Mussorgsky wrote a number of choral works and songs, many of the latter of considerable interest, including the group The Nursery. ‘The Song of the Flea’, based on Goethe’s Mephistophelean song in Faust, is a bass favourite.

The son of a distinguished Russian singer, Stravinsky spent his earlier years in Russia, either in St Petersburg or, in the summer, at the country estates of his relatives. He studied music briefly with Rimsky-Korsakov but made a name for himself first in Paris with commissions from the impresario Diaghilev, for whom he wrote a series of ballet scores. He spent the years after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in Western Europe and in 1939 moved to the United States of America. There in the post-war years he turned from a style of eclectic neoclassicism to composing in the 12-note technique propounded by Schoenberg. A versatile composer, inventive in changing styles, he may be seen as the musical counterpart of the painter Picasso.

Stage Works
Stravinsky made an immediate impression in Paris with his score for L’Oiseau de feu (‘The Firebird’) for the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev. There followed the very Russian Petrushka, set in a Russian fairground, and then the 1913 succès de scandale of Le Sacre du printemps (‘The Rite of Spring’). After wartime works on a smaller scale, including The Soldier’s Tale, Stravinsky turned again to ballet for Diaghilev in Pulcinella, based on music wrongly attributed to Pergolesi. Later ballets include Apollon musagète, Le Baiser de la fée (‘The Fairy’s Kiss’), Jeu de cartes (‘Card Game’) and Agon. The Latin opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, with a text translated from Cocteau, was first staged in 1928, while the opera The Rake’s Progress, neoclassical in form and based on the engravings of Hogarth, with a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, was staged in Venice in 1951.

Orchestral Music
Stravinsky’s orchestral music includes symphonies, suites from some of the ballets, and two suites arranged from sets of easy piano pieces. Concertos of various kinds include a 1936 Concerto for piano, wind, timpani and double basses, the Ebony Concerto for jazz band, and a Violin Concerto.

Chamber and Instrumental Music
Stravinsky’s chamber music includes some arrangements of orchestral works, in particular two versions of music from Pulcinella, one for violin and piano and one for cello and piano, both under the title Suite italienne.

Choral and Vocal Music
Stravinsky’s choral music ranges from major works such as the Symphony of Psalms to settings of Latin and Slavonic religious texts, the arranged Four Russian Peasant Songs, and the final Requiem Canticles. His solo vocal works are equally varied, including songs from traditional Russian sources, his sacred cantata Abraham and Isaac with its Hebrew text, the Elegy for J.F.K. with a text by W.H. Auden, and a setting of Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat.