A rare concert sighting of Christoph von Dohnanyi
OrchestrasThe doyen German conductor has not been seen in the podium for around seven years after a period of ill health. He is 94 and doing well.
Yesterday, without warning, he turned up at the Isar Philharmonie in Munich for a chat with his old pal, the pianist Rudolf Buchbinder.
So nice to see Christoph out and about once more.
Never announced as retired though, I don’t think.
He does look well.
That’s such an awful hall, in such a shabby and distant part of Munich!
As if the Gasteig wasn’t bad enough. Nice location was about it.
Agreed that he looks great, and very happy he’s still with us
Superb photo. I would like so much to be a friend of Buchbinder my favorit male pianist.
Such a marvellous conductor – when is Universal going to grant Dohnányi the honour of releasing a comprehensive box set of all those marvellous Decca recordings he made for that label?
yes – good point. Think of those great Schumann and Dvorak symphonies. And that Webern album
Of course, George Szell will get the credit…
Good to see the conductor and a bit of the past. I lived in Cleveland when he conducted there.
Great musician, wonderful human being
Worthy son of a great father he lost tragically early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Dohnanyi
CvD could be nice but he could also be cantankerous. I was present at one recording session decades ago when someone in the orchestra just couldn’t please him, and he finally snapped at them. Anja Silja, his wife, was present. She sat quietly at the back of the hall knitting between takes. On hearing the rumpus start, she quickly put down the needles, got up and walked to the orchestra. “Leave him to me!”, she said and hauled him off the podium and out of Kingsway Hall. Now, heaven knows what she said, but when he came back a few minutes later the orchestra “played like angels”. At the end of the session every member of the orchestra thanked her.
It astonishes me that he is never brought up in discussions of “great” conductors, which, IMO, he is. His comment while music director at Cleveland always sadly amuses me, viz: “When we (ie. The Cleveland Orchestra} give a great performance, Szell gets the credit”
To answer your own question, I suggest that you listen carefully to Szell’s recordings. You can easily compare many of CvD’s with Szell’s of the same work.
Franz Welser-Möst ruined the sound of TCO