Carlo maria giulini biography of albert

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra family joins the music world in grieving the loss of legendary American pianist André Watts, who died on July 12, 2023. He was seventy-seven.

Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, to a Hungarian mother and an African American U.S. Army soldier. His mother was his first piano teacher, and by the age of nine, he had won a competition to perform on a children’s concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Watts became a part of the American musical fabric when, at the age of sixteen, he appeared on a nationally televised Young People’s Concert with the New York Philharmonic on January 15, 1963, performing Liszt’s First Piano Concerto under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. Two weeks later, an ailing Glenn Gould canceled with the Philharmonic, and Bernstein invited Watts to perform the same Liszt concerto on subscription concerts on short notice. Columbia Masterworks soon recorded Watts’s interpretation, and the release The Exciting Debut of André Watts won the 1963 Grammy Award for Most Promising New Classical Recording Artist.

Watts became a student of Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory, combining his studies with a packed concert schedule that quickly included as many as 150 concerts a year. He soon made his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival in June 1965, one day before his nineteenth birthday. Performing at the inauguration of U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1969, Watts had become a symbol for the civil rights movement, a quiet fighter “who lets his good example as a famous artist have the effect of a thousand protesters,” according to Norman Darden, writing in the Saturday Review in July 1969. In 1976, Watts gave a recital televised on PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center series, making him the first pianist to have a full-length recital broadcast on television in the United States.

Watts was the youngest person ever to receive an honorary doctorate from Y

Postby Ralph » Thu Jun 16, 2005 11:02 am

From The New York Times:

June 16, 2005
Carlo Maria Giulini, Master Italian Conductor, Dies at 91
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Carlo Maria Giulini, the esteemed Italian conductor, an idealistic maestro acclaimed for his refined and insightful accounts of the standard orchestral repertory and for several now classic recordings of operas by Mozart and Verdi, died on Tuesday in Brescia in northern Italy. He was 91 and lived in Bolzano, Italy.

His son Alberto Maria Giulini announced the death yesterday.

Far from being an autocratic conductor or a kinetic dynamo of the podium, Mr. Giulini was a probing musician who achieved results by projecting serene authority and providing a model of selfless devotion to the score. His symphonic performances were at once magisterial and urgent, full of surprise yet utterly natural. He brought breadth and telling detail to the operas of Mozart and Verdi. Handsome and impeccably tailored, he was a deeply spiritual musician. The former New York Times critic Donal Henahan once called him "San Carlo of the Symphony."

Through most of his career, Mr. Giulini resisted assuming full-time responsibility for an orchestra. He had little patience with administrative details and a distaste for the glad-handing typically required of a music director of a major institution. Needing frequent periods for reflection and study, he preferred guest-conducting associations.

He had a 23-year relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, starting in 1955 (his first American engagement). From 1969 to 1978 he was its principal guest conductor. He was also the principal conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra for three years during the 1970's.

In 1978 he became the principal conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Being a leading cultural figure in America's star-struck movie capital might have seemed a curious role for this discerning and reclusive Italian. He mostly restricted his comm

NEW YORK (AP) — “Now I will conduct a short excerpt from Ravel’s ‘Bolero,’” the Metropolitan Opera’s future music director announces proudly.

It’s Yannick Nezet-Seguin, but he’s not the figure familiar to opera lovers on the podium of one of the world’s great concert halls. Instead, he’s a fourth-grader addressing the talent show at Saint-Isaac-Jogues primary school in Montreal.

And then, in Susan Froemke’s new documentary, “Yannick: An Artist’s Journey,” the 10-year-old boy launches into an exuberant exhibition of arm-waving to a recording of Ravel’s ferocious masterwork.

The scene is among the many amateur video moments that help chart the development of one of the most gifted conductors to emerge on the classical music scene in years. And Froemke has smartly paired this early moment with a snippet of the mature Nezet-Seguin leading the Met orchestra in the same piece.

“What’s amazing to me,” she said in an interview, "is if you look at the way he’s moving his arms as a child, it’s almost exactly the way he does it today.”

Those arms are key to his style of conducting, learned from his idol, maestro Carlo Maria Giulini, with whom he spent a year in Italy in his 20s.

“He was always saying that the clarity of the conductor comes from the clarity of the thought, and if your thought is clear, then the gesture will be clear,” Nezet-Seguin recalls of Giulini in the film. “You need to imagine that the sound is between your torso and your hands and you’re sort of holding the sound.”

The other major musical influence in his life was pianist Anisia Campos, with whom he studied from ages 13 to 21. He had already set his heart on a career as a conductor, but she insisted he study as if he were going to be a concert pianist.

“That was the best education I could have wished for,” Nezet-Seguin observes. “Because only through this kind of discipline can a conductor address the best orchestras in the world later.

Italian conductor (1914–2005)

Carlo Maria GiuliniCavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (Italian pronunciation:[ˈkarlomaˈriːadʒuˈliːni]; 9 May 1914 – 14 June 2005) was an Italian conductor. From the age of five, when he began to play the violin, Giulini's musical education was expanded when he began to study at Italy's foremost conservatory, the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome at the age of 16. Initially, he studied the viola and conducting; then, following an audition, he won a place in the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

Although he won a conducting competition two years later, he was unable to take advantage of the prize, which was the opportunity to conduct, because of being forced to join the army during World War II despite being a pacifist. As the war was ending, he hid until the liberation to avoid continuing to fight alongside the Germans. While in hiding, he married his girlfriend, Marcella, and they remained together until her death in 1995. Together, they had three children. After the 1944 liberation, he was invited to lead what was then known as the Augusteo Orchestra (now the Santa Cecilia Orchestra) in its first post-Fascist concert, and quickly other conducting opportunities came along. These included some of the world's major orchestras including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London's Philharmonia Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. His career spanned 54 years with retirement coming in 1998. He died in Brescia, Italy, at 91 years of age.

Early life

Giulini was born in Barletta, Kingdom of Italy, to a father from Lombardy and a mother from Naples; but he was raised in Bolzano, which at the time of his birth was part of Austria (it became Italian, following a provision included in the Treaty of London (1915), with the end of First World War in 1919). Therefore, most of the neighbors spoke a dialect of German, and the local music he heard tended to be