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From a concert given at Salle du Pavillon in Montreux, Switzerland on September 21, 1958 – a performance of Elgar’s Enigma Variations (Variations On An Original Theme) featuring Orchestre National de France under the direction of Pierre Monteux.
Since his first visit to London with the Ballets Russes in 1911, Monteux had had a “love affair with London and with British musicians”. He had conducted for the fledgling BBC in an orchestral concert at Covent Garden in 1924, where he conducted the first public performance of the BBC Wireless Orchestra, and for the Royal Philharmonic Society at the Queen’s Hall in the 1920s and 1930s.[126] In 1932 he was one of four conductors who took charge of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester in the absence of its principal conductor; the other three substitutes were Sir Edward Elgar, Beecham and the young Barbirolli.[127] The Hallé players were immensely impressed with Monteux, and said that his orchestral technique and knowledge easily beat those of most other conductors. In 1951 he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a concert of Mozart, Beethoven and Bartók in the new Royal Festival Hall, and made further appearances with London orchestras during the rest of the 1950s. He would have made more but for Britain’s strict quarantine laws, which prevented the Monteuxs from bringing their pet French poodle with them; Doris Monteux would not travel without the poodle, and Monteux would not travel without his wife.
In June 1958 Monteux conducted the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in three concerts, described by the orchestra’s historian Richard Morrison as “a sensation with players, press and public alike.” The first concert included Elgar’s Enigma Variations, in which Cardus judged Monteux to be more faithful to Elgar’s conception than English conductors generally were. Cardus added, “After the performance of the ‘Enigma’ Variations, the large audience cheered and clapped Monteux for several minutes. This applause, moreover, broke out just before the interval. English audiences are not as a rule inclined to waste time applauding at or during an interval: they usually have other things to do.” Monteux considered British concertgoers “the most attentive in the world”, and British music critics “the most intelligent”. However, a disadvantage of conducting a London orchestra was having to perform at the Festival Hall, of which he shared with Beecham and other conductors an intense dislike: “from the conductor’s rostrum it is impossible to hear the violins”.
Pierre Monteux’s later London performances were not only with the LSO. In 1960 he conducted Beecham’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performing “feats of wizardry” in works by Beethoven, Debussy and Hindemith. The LSO offered him the post of principal conductor in 1961, when he was eighty-six; he accepted, on condition that he had a contract for twenty-five years, with an option of renewal. His large and varied repertoire was displayed in his LSO concerts. In addition to the French repertoire with which, to his occasional irritation, he was generally associated, he programmed Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner, as well as later composers including Granados, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Richard Strauss and Vaughan Williams. With the LSO, Pierre Monteux gave a fiftieth anniversary performance of The Rite of Spring at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of the composer. Although the recording of the occasion reveals some lapses of ensemble and slack rhythms, it was an intense and emotional concert, and Monteux climbed up to Stravinsky’s box to embrace him at the end. Players believed that in his few years in charge he transformed the LSO; Neville Marriner felt that he “made them feel like an international orchestra … He gave them extended horizons and some of his achievements with the orchestra, both at home and abroad, gave them quite a different constitution.”
From the Wikipedia passage on Pierre Monteux during the 1950s.
Enjoy.
