ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENTS “World’s Oldest Conductor”

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30498, 21 July 1964, Page 6

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENTS “World’s Oldest Conductor”

Mr Pierre Monteux, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra since 1961, who died on Joly 1 at Hancock, Maine, at the age of 89, was one of the last active great conductors who had a close personal link with the most significant musical events

of the century. Old age saw no lessening either in his powers or his activity. Each successive concert increased one’s astonishment at his seemingly inexhaustible energy, at his sensitivity to orchestral nuance and colour, and his remarkable ability to draw from his players the most finely articulated playing with the minimum of gesture; no less astonishing was his extraordinarily wide range of musical sympathies. The economy of gesture, however, was a sign of authority, for he had lived with the music he directed for more than half a century —and of masterly technical control. Conducted At 12 Monteux was born in Paris on April 4, 1875, and he studied the violin at the Paris Conservatoire. He was 12 when he conducted his first concert, and shortly afterwards he took an orchestra on a concert tour. But at this stage the violin was still his chief study. He emerged from the Conservatoire with premier prix du violon, shared with Jacque Thibaud, but settled down as a viola player at the Opera Comique, and led his section in the first performance of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande.”

In 1910 he obtained a post as conductor at the Dieppe Casino, and in the following year began his association with . Diaghilev’s Russian ballet which soon brought him international fame. Monteux was in charge of the first performance of Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe,” Debussy's “Jeux” and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” to name only three works of the highest and most seminal importance in later music. Monteux knew and was admired by all these composers, and during the half century that followed his interpretations of their music acquired a nonpareil authority. “It was no sinecure—that conductor’s post with the

Diaghilev Ballet,” writes David Ewen in “Dictators of the Baton.” “The music of Stravinsky, which then burst on the world of music like a bolt of lightning, demanded an exacting technique. With its enormous rhythmic and harmonic complexity it called for all the resources of a conductor’s science.” U.S. Orchestras During World War L Monteux served in the French Army, but in 1916 he was able to go to America as conductor of ballet and opera (he became a specialist in Russian as well as French works). In 1919 he was appointed director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but resigned in 1924 to return to Europe as joint conductor, with Mengelberg, of the Con-

certgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. In 1936 America called him once more, and from then until 1952 he conducted the San Francisco Orchestra, with incalculable effect on American musical culture, but also with the opportunity to enlarge his already substantial ■ repertoire, and by gradual, natural processes to deepen his understanding of his art. He and his wife made their home at Hancock, Maine (where the university awarded Monteux an honorary Doctorate), and he became an American citizen. He left San Francisco in 1952 only to travel more extensively; his vigour and appetite for music remained amazingly youthful, and his repertoire was growing all the time—at

80 he learnt Elgar’s Enigma Variations, conducted them from memory, and gave performances which British orchestral musicians acclaimed as closer than any other to those of Elgar himself. British Visits Monteux’s visits to England now began to assume a major importance in British musical life: it was not only in French and American music that he excelled, but also in the Viennese classics and, particularly, Brahms, music that nationalistic prejudices had long assumed outside the full comprehension of a Latin musician. Monteux was one of a number of Latin musicians who disproved this theory altogether, and when his regular appearances with the steadily developing London Symphony Orchestra received their firm recognition with his acceptance of the orchestra’s principal conductorship, England gained and welcomed a conductor whose powers of illumination extended the length and breadth of his enormous repertoire. Loved Work, Food By now he knew when to spare his strength— usually, for his occasional Illnesses, learnt with pessimistic alarm, regularly proved due either to accepting too manv activities, or to his love of delicious food.

In rehearsal, he never spared himself, but on the platform at the concert he presided with benign tranquality, aware that the smallest flicker of his left hand would remind his players of work thoroughuly prepared in advance. His personality and his serene, expressive face were enough to inspire vitality and freshness of execution.

But he continued to travel throughout Europe and America, and to lead the London S,O. on its various foreign tours. Nor did his instrumental ability fade away. In the 1950 s he took the place of the Budapest Quartet’s viola player, at short notice, playing the music without rehearsal, and from memory. Monteux’s longevity, and the energy that accompanied his musicianship was the source of his unique distinction as a conductor, and it sprang from the character of the man, not from any mere powers of physical endurance.