Herbert Blomstedt: Where I first heard Bruckner, in 1942
NewsThe oldest working maestro, 94 and still busy, has returned to his earliest Swedish concert hall.
Watch the fascinating video here.
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Next week, Maestro Blomstedt is conducting Bruckner’s 4th in Boston with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Can’t wait!
I will be there -weather permitting!
He is conducting the Bruckner4th with the BSO next week.
He seems older than Bruckner.
We were fortunate to have him for a good length of time in S.F., and I think people here now are truly realizing that.
I remember his tenure in SF as being undistinguished. I was there. People adored Josef Krips, not so much him.
Your memory is poor. Blomstedt’s tenure is universally acknowledged by those with knowledge and sound judgement to be among the most consequential in the orchestra’s history.
He took an orchestra that had been struggling to maintain standards and rebuilt it to international standing. He laid the groundwork for what has come since.
Blomstedt has a serious demeanor and is a devout adherent to a particularly unique and disciplined form of Christianity. He is in no way the type to don a rainbow skirt to dance the Cancan in Castro, so no doubt the more vapid, frivolous denizens of the city were less than enamored.
I agree, he rebuilt an international orchestra and put it on the map. The record legacy shows rooms for improvement in term of personality though. MTT continued the work, but stayed maybe 10 years too long….
Krips had little effect on the orchestra.The orchestra hated him.He refused to make recordings with the orchestra,because he thought it as inferior to most European orchestras.Blomstedt refined the sound,got them a Decca contract,and his interprations were far superior to Krips.Krips also hated women in the orchestra(the SFS had quite a few from quite early on),and constantly derided and verbally attacked them.
Charming interview. He conducts Bruckner 4 in Boston with the BSO on February 17, 18, and 19.
Wonderful interview.
HB says a couple of very apt things, which demonstrate that basically, ‘classical music’ is an art of psychology, the language of which can cover a wider territory of emotional experience than language can. But speaking about music means: using poetic metaphors, and that is exactly what HB does here.
This wonderful post brings me back memories of “my” first Mahler’s Symphony, the Sixth.
Salle de la Matze, Sion, Switzerland conducted by Moshe Atzmon.
By then, no Mahler was performed around!
We were a group of Conservatoire de Genève students very thrilled to attend the concert.
It was just GREAT, and during long months we would talk about it with joy and emotion!
Worked with Moshe twice…which included a most impressive performance of Bartok’s Dance Suite… Great musician…!
In the last concert we played before the pandemic shut us down two years ago, Maestro Blomstedt presided over a gorgeous performance of Brahms Second Symphony with the Chicago Symphony. At the beginning of the first rehearsal, he summoned one of the stage hands. There was a stool for him to use on the podium, as there always is for conductors at rehearsals. He politely requested that it be removed. “Those are for old people,” he explained. He stood for the entire two and a half hours we rehearsed. All four rehearsals.
He is a triumph of vegetarianism.
I was one of the (few) lucky ones to get tickets for both concerts in Gothenburg due to new Covid-restrictions at that time. The concerts were amazing! The love and appreciation for Maestro Blomstedt from both the audience and the orchestra were on full display.