Bruno Walter plays and conducts Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20, KV 466 (Live 1939)

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Bruno Walter plays and conducts Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, KV 466 (Live 11/03/1939)

Pianist : Bruno Walter
Conductor : Bruno Walter
Orchestra : N.B.C Symphony Orchestra
Date : 11/03/1939

Walter was born into a modest middle-class Jewish family: his father was a book-keeper. Initially, he trained as a pianist, entering the Stern Conservatory in Berlin when he was eight years old, and making his public debut the following year in a student performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. However, after hearing Hans von Bülow conduct in 1889 and visiting the Bayreuth Festival two years later, Walter decided to pursue conducting as a career. As a student he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1893 in a setting of Goethe which he had composed himself, and later that year he joined the Cologne Opera as a répétiteur.

It was with this company that Walter made his professional debut as a conductor, in Lortzing’s Der Waffenschmied during 1894, and the following autumn he joined the Hamburg Opera as chorusmaster. Here he worked closely with Gustav Mahler, the company’s chief conductor, who proved to be a major influence upon the young musician, and who secured for him his first conducting post, as first conductor at Breslau in 1896. At the start of the following season Walter moved to the same position in Pressburg (now Bratislava); and after a year there he went to Riga where he stayed for two seasons before taking up a conducting post at the Berlin Court Opera, the leading opera house in Germany at this time. Here Walter’s colleagues included Richard Strauss and Karl Muck; at the end of 1900, he conducted the first performance of Pfitzner’s opera Der arme Heinrich. Mahler invited Walter to join him as a conductor and assistant at the Vienna Court Opera where he was based from 1901 to 1912, composing as well as conducting: the première of his Symphony No. 1 took place in 1909.

Increasingly active as a guest conductor, Walter made his debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1910 with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers.

Walter made his first appearances in America in 1923, conducting in New York, Detroit, Minnesota and Boston, and two years later he made his debut at the Salzburg Festival and was appointed chief conductor at the Berlin Städtische Opera, or Municipal Opera, having been a regular conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic since 1919. Walter emigrated to America with his family in 1939, settling in Beverly Hills in California.

During the war years Walter was active as a conductor principally in New York, appearing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (later serving as artistic adviser between 1947 and 1949) and with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, leading productions of operas by Beethoven, Mozart and Verdi. His final recording sessions took place in March 1961 and he died of a further heart attack in the following year.

Walter was a pre-eminent conductor in a period rich in musicians of stature. He sought to re-create the works which he conducted as if they were receiving their first performance, and this sense of the excitement of fresh discovery can be clearly discerned for instance in his truly historic recording of Act One of Wagner’s Die Walküre, made in 1935 with Lotte Lehmann and Lauritz Melchior with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as in many of his opera performances recorded live from the Salzburg Festival and Metropolitan Opera. As his recordings of the Brahms symphonies with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for instance demonstrate, he was able to combine a strong sense of stylistic fidelity with a personal and highly impassioned vision. His close relationship with Mahler gives his recordings of the music of this composer especial authority: his account of the Symphony No. 9, made in concert in Vienna immediately before the Anschluss, possesses extraordinary intensity; while his account of Das Lied von der Erde with Kathleen Ferrier and Julius Patzak accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has been recognized as a classic of the gramophone ever since its initial release. Walter’s recorded accounts of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner exist on a similarly exalted plane, and represent, as does all his music-making, the very finest aspects of the nineteenth-century Austro-German tradion of musical performance.