George Szell

George Szell ( György Széll ) is a Leader and American Pianiste of Hungarian origin , born the June 7th 1897 with Budapest and dead the July 29th 1970 with Cleveland

Biography

Its family settles in Vienna whereas he is still child. He works there the piano and the direction of orchestra. Child prodigy, Szell gives recitals of piano to the eleven years age, causing the admiration of Richard Strauss. He studies the composition and the direction of orchestra with Vienna then works with Berlin of which he directs, at seventeen years, the Philharmonic orchestra, with Strasbourg (where he succeeds Otto Klemperer), Prague, Düsseldorf, Darmstadt and $the Hague. Jewish, it leaves Europe in 1939 for the the United States. From 1942 to 1946, he is leader invited to the Metropolitan Opera New York and directs the Philharmonic orchestra of New York in 1944 and 1945. But its name remains attached to the Orchestre of Cleveland, from which it was the Musical director of 1946 with his death and of which it made an internationally recognized phalange.

Repertory

Glenn Gould considered Szell much higher than Leonard Bernstein. In fact, Szell was with the antipodes of the “sympathetic” chief: coleric, tyrannical, stripped of humor and very conscious of its talent, it led its musicians “to the rod” in a generally electric atmosphere. The behavior and the promptness of its orchestra, allied with the reduction of textures, made its reputation while its detractors made fun the little of emotion of its interpretations.

Its legacy discographic (Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Anton Bruckner, Johann Strauss wire, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler…) conceal some wonders ( Of Knaben Wunderhorn , with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) and some failures, which had mainly with the brutality of its control.

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