DIMITRI MITROPOULOS

 

By W. S. MEADMORE

DURING his recent four days' visit to London, Dimitri Mitropoulos, conducting the New York Philharmonic, gave the second performance here of Shostakovitch's Tenth Symphony. Those lucky enough to be present heard an astonishing and brilliant performance, particularly of the exciting and breathtaking Scherzo. It was a musical occasion not to be forgotten, and the applause which followed had all the frenzy of a last night Prom audience. Such an interpretation indicated that Mitropoulos is one of the foremost conductors of modernistic music, if not the foremost.

He is a Greek, born of Greek parents in Athens in 1896. His father, a leather merchant, was a son of a priest of the Greek Orthodox Church and the nephew of an Archbishop. Also two other of his relatives were monks at Mount Athos. So, with this family tradition, and although as a boy Mitropoulos showed an exceptional talent for music and had early begun to study at the Odeion, the conservatory at Athens, it was his father's intention that he should eventually enter a monastic order. But when it came to the point of abandoning his music and becoming a monk, Mitropoulos was torn between two desires. After much mental conflict, he decided in favour of music.

At the Odeion, Mitropoulos studied piano and composition and played percussion instruments in the orchestra. At the age of 14 he composed incidental music for performances of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. After brief service in the army as a drummer in the Balkan war, he returned to Athens and studied at the University. Here, in his last year and at the age of 23, he wrote an opera based on Maeterlinck's Soeur Beatrice. This was performed at the Odeion and praised by Saint-Saëns. Instead, however, of accepting this composer's offer of further study in Paris, Mitropoulos went to Brussels and worked at the organ and composition. He then proceeded, on a scholarship, to Berlin, where he met Ferruccio Busoni, who accepted him as one of his five-member class. The Sonata which he had written and submitted for entrance was criticised as having "too much passion ".

Busoni was a compelling influence on Mitropoulos and persuaded him to give up composition as his chief aim. "From what Busoni told me", Mitropoulos said, "I lost all respect for myself as a composer. I listened to Busoni, absorbed his knowledge, and ended up as a re-creator instead of a creator ".

After three years (1921-24) as assistant conductor at the Berlin Staatsoper, he became conductor of the Athens Symphony Orchestra and director of the Odeion. His European reputation was established in 1930 when, as guest conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic and Egon Petri being unable at the last moment to appear, he played the solo part in Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto and conducted the orchestra at the same time. This feat Mitropoulos repeated in Paris and subsequently in London and other capitals. For four consecutive years, beginning in 1933, he toured the principal Italian cities and from 1934 to 1937 conducted a three month season at Monte Carlo. He also conducted at, among other places, Leningrad and Moscow.

In 1936, Koussevitzky, then musical director of the Boston Symphony, invited him to Boston as a guest conductor for two weeks. His conducting on this occasion was rendered notable for an " illuminating " reading of Richard Strauss's Sinfonia Domestica, and as a result of this he appeared in 1937 as a guest conductor of the Cleveland and Minneapolis orchestras. In that same year he was invited to fill the vacant post of conductor to the Minneapolis Orchestra in succession to Eugene Ormandy. In the next twelve years Mitropoulos made this orchestra into "one of the most notable ensembles in the country" (New York Times). At the outset he had announced a policy of allocating three programmes every season to modernistic music by such composers as Mahler, Schönberg and Hindemith. It is of interest that in 1940 he was awarded the American Mahler Medal of Honour in recognition of "his efforts to create greater interest in and appreciation" of Mahler's music. From 1947 until 1949, Mitropoulos repeatedly conducted, as a guest, the New York Philharmonic Symphony. In 1949 he shared the rostrum with Stokowski, but in 1950, Stokowski had to relinquish this dual-conductorship, and Mitropoulos became sole musical director.

In 1950, he, with the New York Orchestra, appeared at the Roxy Theatre for two weeks, during which he gave four performances daily, these sandwiched between showings of a feature film. Mitropoulos remarked that it was "the music that counts, the time or place doesn't matter ". Anyhow, the experiment was successful, and was repeated. During the 1949-50 season he gave a concert performance of Strauss's Elektra, and in the following seasons similar performances of Milhaud's Les Choéphores and Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole. He also revived Berg's atonal opera Wozzeck. This was recorded as a Columbia album. Among his other gramophonic successes of this period was Khachaturian's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (with Oscar Levant as soloist) and Roger Session's Second Symphony. In 1951 he took the New York Orchestra to Edinburgh for fourteen performances during the Festival of Britain celebrations : this visit to the Festival was repeated last year. Two other notable concert performances occurred in 1951 : that of Busoni's one act "theatrical capriccio", Arlecchino, and Schönberg's musical monodrama, Erwartung.

He conducts without a score and often without a baton. When he conducts his whole body seems to vibrate to the musical emotion. He has a passion for climbing mountains and he is said to live modestly in the back room of a hotel. He is a hard worker and eats sparingly of simple dishes. Much of his leisure is spent in reading Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and the Greek dramatists. His ascetic life has often been remarked upon, and he is known for his generous aid to college students and struggling composers. Discussing modernistic music he said he considered Vaughan Williams' Fourth Symphony an outstanding contribution and that he could not understand the neglect of such a significant composer as Joseph Holbrooke.