Another historic performance this weekend – Orchestre National de Radio France conducted by Joseph Keilberth and featuring Wilhelm Backhaus in Beethoven’s 3rd Piano concerto – recorded at Salle du Pavillon in Montreux, Switzerland on September 25, 1962; by RTS.
Wilhelm Backhaus made his first concert tour at the age of sixteen. In 1900 he went to England and in 1901 played for the first time in Manchester at the Gentleman’s Concerts. In 1902 he performed at the Hallé Concerts, and thereafter in 12 concerts at the Queen’s Hall, London, and played 6 different piano concertos at the Promenade Concerts. In 1904 he became Professor of Piano at the Royal Manchester College of Music. In 1905 he won the Anton Rubinstein Competition, with Béla Bartók taking second place. He toured widely throughout his life – in 1921 he gave seventeen concerts in Buenos Aires in less than three weeks. Backhaus made his U.S. debut on 5 January 1912 as soloist in Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto (the “Emperor”) with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra.[1] He taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in 1926. In 1930, he moved to Lugano and became a citizen of Switzerland. He died in Villach in Austria, where he was due to play in a concert. His last recital a few days earlier in Ossiach was recorded.
Joseph Keilberth began his career in the State Theatre of his native city, Karlsruhe, joining as a répétiteur in 1925 and conducting from 1935 to 1940. In 1940 he became director of the German Philharmonic Orchestra of Prague. In 1945, near the end of World War II, he was appointed principal conductor of the venerable Saxon State Opera Orchestra in Dresden. In 1949 he became chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, formed mainly of German musicians expelled from postwar Czechoslovakia under the Beneš decrees. Starting in 1950, Keilberth became a guest conductor at the Berlin State Opera, and was named chief conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Keilberth became a conductor of the Bavarian State Opera in 1951, and he succeeded Ferenc Fricsay as its artistic director in 1959.
He died in Munich in 1968 after collapsing while conducting Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde in exactly the same place as Felix Mottl was similarly fatally stricken in 1911. His final recording, a Meistersinger, came a month before his death — at the Bavarian State Opera on 21 June.
Wilhelm Backhaus and Joseph Keilberth in this remarkeable pairing for Swiss Radio – enjoy.
