Something rare this week – a concert from French Radio, recorded on February 2, 1956, featuring Orchestre National de la RTF conducted by Manuel Rosenthal with Andor Földes, piano in a concert of music by Poulenc, Prokofiev and Mihalovici.
Beginning with Les Animaux Modèles ballet by Francis Poulenc. Followed by La Pas d’acier ballet by Prokofiev and concluding the concert with Marcel Mihalovici’s Sinfonia Partita op. 66 featuring Andor Földes, piano.
Manuel Rosenthal was born in Paris to Anna Devorsosky, of Russian-Jewish descent, and a French father he never met. His surname was taken from his stepfather, Bernard Rosenthal.
He started his musical studies on violin at age 6, which he played in cafés and cinemas after his stepfather’s death in 1918 to support his mother and sisters. In 1920, he entered the Conservatoire in Paris but eventually left it after failing to win an expected first prize. In addition to continuing his violin studies with Alterman and Jules Boucherit and playing in theatre and cinema bands, he also studied composition. Around this time he met Léo Sir, inventor of string instruments known as the dixtuor, and was persuaded to play the sursoprano (a 4th higher than the violin) and find composers to write for this new medium. Through this Rosenthal met eminent young Parisian composers of whom Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger were the most distinguished, and also contributed his own music to a recital in Paris in October 1921.
His conducting career began in earnest in 1934, when he became percussionist and assistant conductor of the Orchestre National de France, to Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht. In 1936, Georges Mandel invited him to conduct the Orchestre de Radio PTT. As his fame as a conductor grew, he was attacked in Action Française in 1937 by Lucien Rebatet, who demanded his expulsion from his radio conductorship. In the same year Serge Koussevitzky, in Paris during the Exposition, invited Rosenthal to become assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony under him – an offer reiterated after a Salle Pleyel concert on the eve of war in 1939. After Ravel’s death in 1937, and following the success of Gaîté Parisienne, he became a close colleague of Igor Stravinsky.
Andor Földes first studied the piano with his mother, Valerie Ipolye, and with Tibor Szatmari in his home town of Óbuda. He made his public debut performing a Mozart concerto with the Budapest Philharmonic when he was 8 years old (1921). He entered the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in 1922. Földes studied with Ernő Dohnányi until 1932 and with Béla Bartók from 1929. He made his American debut in a radio recital in 1940, and his recital debut at New York Town Hall in 1941. On 3 November 1947, he performed Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto in the opening concert of the 18th season of the National Orchestral Association, conducted by Léon Barzin, at Carnegie Hall in New York City 1947. It was the first performance of the concerto in New York, though there had been earlier American performances in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco and Bartok himself had performed the work in 1940 in Cleveland with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodzinski. His 1948 recording of the Bartók 2nd piano concerto is prized by collectors, as is a set of Bartók works he recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, which won the Grand Prix du Disque and other prizes. Földes met his wife (Lili Rendy), a Hungarian journalist, in New York and they became U.S. citizens (see his wife’s book Two on the Continent Dutton, 1947). Due to his European concert engagements being more plentiful than his American ones, he and his wife moved to Europe, settling in Switzerland in 1961. Besides a large discography, which includes not only Bartók but also works by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Falla, Debussy, Poulenc, Liszt, Schubert and Rachmaninoff, Földes was the author of “Keys to the Keyboard” (1948), an article in the Etude Magazine (USA) (December, 1953) “Impressions of a Musical Journey to Africa”, and an article “Beethoven’s Kiss” in Reader’s Digest (November 1986), also an autobiography 70 Years on Music’s Magic Carpet (published 2004).
This concert was rebroadcast by France Musique in 2013.
Enjoy.
