Another installment from the award winning radio series, Toscanini: Man Behind The Legend, produced by NBC Radio in 1963. When I initially ran an episode from this series last week, I ran the Armed Forces Radio version, which is different by at least a half-hour (the NBC Radio series was 1 hour – Armed Forces Radio version was 1/2 hour). So I thought I would include this one to give a better idea of what the series really sounded like, as opposed to the truncated version. And also because several of you wrote in asking if there were more in this series lurking in my archive – the answer was yes.
This episode is the 6th one of the series. I was originally broadcast on July 10, 1963 and features an interview with Journalist and Biographer Howard Taubman, who was a reporter during the very early days of Toscanini’s tenure with the NBC Symphony, as well as his earlier post as Music Director or the New York Philharmonic.
Taubman offers a number of interesting anecdotes about his association with Toscanini, one which became close over the years and which led Taubman to write one of the better biographies on Arturo Toscanini that have been published over the years.
The musical portions, though not indicated if they are from concert broadcasts or commercials lps (I suspect lp’s, but since NBC was owned by RCA at the time, anything was possible) are Mozart’s Symphony Number 40 and Prokofiev’s Symphony number 1 “Classical”.
As was the case for the entire series, it’s narrated by Ben Grauer who also interviews Taubman.
I hope to add more over the coming months, as soon as they are digitized and ready to post. In the meantime, here is another one from this fine series about one of the legendary figures in Classical music during the 20th century.
