Don Tait
Unregistered guest

Posted on Saturday, December 05, 2009 - 03:45 pm:

Hi Bill -- Thanks for your reply to my message. A couple of thoughts... As I hope I said in my first post, I of course have no way of knowing whether it was Mahler who set a trend for conducting Bach from the keyboard in the 1910s, especially because he died in 1911, but he did do Bach from the keyboard. And of course there were many disciples of his who might have followed in his footsteps, such as Bruno Walter and Ossip Gabrilowitsch, both of whom did conduct from the keyboard. I think there have been a few recordings of the "suite" Mahler arranged from Bach's music. I remember announcing and playing one, at least, on WFMT. Google will give the answer, probably! It's "big-band" circa 1900 orchestra Bach for sure. Then: thanks for your friend's story about Stokowski in Louisiana. Yes, Toscanini might have done something similar, but "Stoki" indeed did too repeatedly. Oliver Daniel, in his mammoth biography of Stokowski, wrote about an incident when Stoki and his All-American Youth Orchestra were on an ocean liner headed for a South American tour in 1940. Stokowski agreed to give a short concert with the orchestra on the ship. Everyone gathered. Then Stokowski said loudly that he could not go on because there was noise. No one knew what he was talking about, since the audience had been completely quiet. No one noticed anything. But Stokowski was adamant. After a while it turned out that what he meant was the scarcely-audible low, bass-area throbbing of the ship's engines. Everyone on the ship was used to the sound, but Stokowski "caught" it. He demanded that the engines be turned off and refused to conduct until they were. They were. The ship sat becalmed in the Atlantic, something virtually unheard of at Stoki's command, during the music. The main points are that no one else had noticed the sound but Stokowski had, despite decades of standing amid the thunders of orchestras (and I heard him conduct live (did you?): he evoked thunders that were shattering even in the gallery); and that he could do something like that. Stokowski had a degree of authority and fame that equalled Toscanini's in many ways, so he could be a "law." Finally, thanks for your kind words about me on WFMT. For a lot of it, they were "great days" to experience for sure.
Don Tait

Don Tait
Unregistered guest

Posted on Friday, December 04, 2009 - 02:40 pm:

I've just come across this, a bit tardily. Since Jennifer said the conductor was said to have conducted Bach from the keyboard in the 1910s, I suspect that it might have been Gustav Mahler. He did so in the suite he arranged from Bach's Suites and Brandenburg Concerti, with the New York Philharmonic at least when he was the orchestra's regular conductor until his death in 1911. Mahler's Suite has been recorded a number of times. It could have been another conductor, of course, especially because Jennifer wrote "1910s." However, I must say in reply to Bill, who had a great suggestion about Leopold Stokowski, that I have studied Stokowski's career for many years (I did a memorial series to him on WFMT, 1978-82) and own a listing of his concert programs, and find virtually no mention of him ever conducting anything with orchestra from the keyboard. Stokowski's work with Bach consisted primarily of his many orchestral transcriptions. Although he was by all accounts a brilliant organist and excellent pianist, Stokowski seldom played either instrument in public after he began his full conducting career with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 1909 (his first such post).

Don Tait (WFMT 1972-2007)