Late 1930s
1938 and the Philadelphia Orchestra
On a February afternoon, Friday 4th and on the following Saturday and Tuesday, Jorge made his first appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra (in its 38th season) and its famous conductor Eugene Ormandy.
This was in the Academy of Music, at 240 S. Broad Street between Locust and Manning Streets in the Avenue of the Arts area of Center City. It was built in 1855-57 and has been known as the Grand Old Lady of Broad Street.
Eugene Ormandy (born Jenő Blau; 1899 – 1985),
a Hungarian-born American conductor, had a 44-year association with the orchestra: one of the longest enjoyed by any conductor with an American orchestra.
The programme began with Menotti, Amelia Goes to the Ball (overture). Then Jorge played Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto.
Edwin H. Schloss in the Philadelphia Inquirer states that this was ‘an unusually fine performance of the difficult concerto – which is a nice work if you can get it. Yesterday’s soloist did get it and beautifully.’ He mentions a ‘silken touch, luxuriously rippling technique and (best of all) a head and heart... greatest of ease and the best of good taste.’ The concerto is ‘super-Muscovitish’ in its plaintive mood and Tchaikovskian glamour which makes it a work easily cheapened into sentimentality by Grade B keyboard exhibitionists.
‘Young Bolet avoided that bog.’ The only possible rife in the lute was the fear that young Bolet does not seem to have acquired ‘a tone of sufficient force and resonance to match his other equipment’.
11 March 1938
The Washington Daily News reports on the Cuban envoy's party to celebrate his first year in office., Don Pedro Martinez Fraga. Champagne and whisky/soda flowed freely, there was a huge crock of arroz con jueves. There was also a young and shy man, Jorge Bolet. 'A musician. And of the first order. Cuban and handsome. soon the ehtire gathering grouped around a small drawing room to hear this young man play.'
14 October 1938
First Baptist Church, Chattanooga, Tennessee
The Cuban consul in Chattanooga informed Havana of a recital in the First Baptist Church of the city [as reported in Diario de la Marina 27.10.1938]. The Chattanooga Daily Times reports that Jorge has made his home with Dr and Mrs Donald Gray Barnhouse - the Reverend has been conducting a series of Bible classes in Chattanooga.
Ormandy is seen in 1951 with the famous Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (left, seated) and Nils-Eric Ringbom in Sibelius' home, Ainola. With the Philadelphia Orchestra, Ormandy - among a number of Sibelius performance - made a highly regarded recording in 1979 for
EMI of the Four Lemminkäinen Legends.
The music takes its inspiration from national epic of Finland, the Kalevala.
Ainola, Järvenpää, Finland: June 2023, my short video
Ormandy and Jorge Bolet
Bolet in a recital on 12 March 1985, paying tribute to Ormandy. You'll need to turn the volume up full blast! (Recording courtesy of Francis Crociata)
Godowsky dies
Leopold Godowsky, that arch-magus of the keyboard, died on 21 November 1938 in the Lennox Hill Hospital,
New York City.
Jorge was to continue to champion his works for the rest of his career, making a notable recording of a selection
of the arrangements of Chopin’s études and waltzes for DECCA on its L'Oiseau-Lyre label in 1977.
The (above) telegram is addressed to Paul Howard, founder of the International Godowsky Society (1936-53). Howard was of Irish lineage and was born in London in 1875. He emigrated with his family to Australia at the age of nine, settling in Adelaide, where he lived until his death in 1953. There is a letter from Moriz Rosenthal to Paul Howard (22 June 1940) in which he recalls that he and Godowsky were almost poisoned in a Greek restaurant in Soho, London, which "some idiot had advised him [G] try". 'After the first course, which I remember consisted of cold herring smeared with strawberry jam, he said in his gentle voice, "Not so pleasant, eh?" My reply, which seemed to amuse him and which he was always quoting was: "As far as I am concerned, the only question is how soon I am going to be sick." We finished up at the Piccadilly Grill.'
Telegram & letter source (The New International Godowsky Society)
1939
Thursday, 3 August 1939 in the Anfiteatro, Havana at 9pm. The initiative for the concert came from municipal mayor Dr Antonio Beruff Mendieta (1901-1952), who devoted much time to cultural and educational matters. The programme included Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Strauss II/Godowsky, Künstlerleben ("An Artist's Life" Op.316), this last being one of only two references I've found thus far to a performance by Jorge of this piece (the other being 26 March 1940 at Curtis; he mentions the piece in an interview with David Dubal, when he says that Saperton was probably quite pleased that Bolet could handle Godowsky's music). Diario de la Marina, 2.8.1939
Jorge usually played the Fledermaus paraphrase, though Albert McGrigor has said that he studied both with Leopold Godowsky (around 1933/34).
Monday 18 December 1939, Auditorio, Havana "at the usual hour of 9:30pm": Liszt's Concerto No.2 in A Major with Massimo Freccia. "[Bolet], uno de nos compatriotas que ha alcanzado grandes lauros en el extranjero." One of our compatriots who has achieved great success abroad. (Noticias de Hoy, 14.12.39)
Diario 14.12.39 adds the full programme: A suite of music by Corelli for strings by Ettore Penelli, R Strauss, Death and Transfiguration, Ravel Pavane and Berlioz's Hungarian March from Faust.
Jorge had arrived by air from Miami on 14th at Havana's Arsenal airport on Pan American Airways (the flight continued to Yucatan Mexico. (He departed on 7 January
A recital 20 December for the Sociedad Hubert de Blanck in the Sala Espadero.
Claudio Arrau's recitals at the Teatro Odeón, Buenos Aires on Tuesdays 20 and 27 June 1939 at 6:30 pm, presented as part of the 1939 Season organised by Conciertos Daniel, and sponsored by Blüthner pianos.
JB's arrival on 15 September 1938 in Miami, Florida.
Fritz Reiner, conductor
On his return from Europe, Jorge had gone back to Curtis, and among other things took two years of lessons in conducting with the Hungarian Fritz Reiner (who had joined the faculty in 1931). Reiner said that Jorge was a wonderful pianist, but that he would never make a conductor.
Reiner Frigyes - in the Magyar tongue - (19 December, 1888 – 15 November, 1963). Hungarian born and trained, he emigrated to the United States in 1922, where he rose to prominence as a conductor with several orchestras.
Reiner was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (at the time) into a secular Jewish family that resided in the Pest area of the city. After preliminary studies in law at his father's urging, Reiner instead decided to pursue the study of piano, piano pedagogy, and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy. During his last two years there, his piano teacher was the young Béla Bartók (1906-8). Among the works studied with the composer were Beethoven's last Sonata Op. 111 and Liszt's B minor Sonata, so he must have had a very good technique. (Kenneth Morgan p.26)
Reiner's job at Curtis was not onerous: he had only to undertake one conducting class (of 2 hours) a week. Some of his pupils included Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss, the latter fifteen years old 'and still in kneepants'. The composer, Gian Carlo Menotti claimed to have learned more about how music was made in one Reiner rehearsal than in a month of composition lessons. According to legend, Reiner only once rewarded a student with an A grade, and that student was Bernstein.
He had a vast knowledge of music, but one blind spot was Sibelius. He declared in front of his students that Sibelius was an amateur.
In the early 1930s Mr and Mrs Reiner lived in a spacious Manhattan apartment on Park Avenue, with 17th century, Venetian furnishings brought from Italy. Their home from 1938 onwards was a 43 acre property based around a two- storey French villa near Westport, Connecticut.
Fritz Reiner himself would reach the pinnacle of his career while music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the years 1953-63.
Igor Stravinsky called the Chicago Symphony under Reiner 'the most precise and flexible orchestra in the world', but this was more often than not achieved with tactics that bordered on the personally abusive, as Kenneth Morgan documents in his 2005 biography of the conductor. Any day on which he failed to lose his temper, one critic remarked, was a day on which he was too sick to conduct. His facial expressions ranged from Mephistophelian to a good imitation of Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor who played the Transylvanian vampire Count Dracula in the 1931 film.
The end of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major: Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Fritz Reiner, here appearing during his initial season as Music Director, recorded on kinescope in 1954 at the WGN studios.
'Reiner’s Beethoven mostly just expresses the sour expression on his face.' (David Vernier)
Gunther Schuller told of playing French horn in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra under Reiner. At one rehearsal, Reiner scolded Gunther for a mistake - 'it's as
if this is your first time playing Der Rosenkavalier'.
Gunther, who was probably still in his teens, replied
'But this is my first time'. Everyone went silent, terrified of what Reiner would happen next. Reiner smiled and said: 'How wonderful! To be playing Der Rosenkavalier for the first time!'
Sir, I am probably one of the few people around today who knows what it was like to study conducting under the legendary maestro Fritz Reiner. During his golden reign, the students in his conducting class at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia included Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, Jorge Bolet, Samuel Barber and my late husband Ezra Rachlin, who described Reiner’s class vividly to me.
Reiner gave each student a full orchestral score to study and learn by heart. The student would then have to enter an empty room — no orchestra, just Reiner seated on a chair at one end. Reiner would give the order to start and the student had to conduct the entire symphony from memory in a totally silent room. Without warning, Reiner would stop him and demand: “Which instruments are being played on that beat? What note is the second clarinet playing? Now list all the notes.” If the student could not do it or made a mistake, he was out of the class — for good. In this way, Reiner weeded out those students who did not come up to his high standards.
Ann Rachlin, Icklesham, East Sussex (letter to The Times, 12 August 2008)
Andre Previn speaking in Pittsburgh (1983)
His sister Maria
Bolet came from a strongly religious background, and several siblings became missionaries for the Protestant faith.
Of her later work in Spain (in the ancient city of El Escorial, not far from Madrid), Maria writes:
'Spain must be evangelized at any cost. It seems a totally impossible task as long as Generalisimo Franco
is in power and the Roman Church in full control…Spain has a right to have an opportunity to hear the good news of salvation..’
In a letter from these years, sister Maria writes to a friend, ‘I am so crazy about my little brother that I can understand how proud you must be of yours. My greatest pride about my little brother is that he really loves Jesus Christ as his savior and he prizes him more than the world with all its glories.’
She worried, however, about his contacts. 'I appreciate deeply your interest in my brother's affairs, and your keen insight of the whole situation regarding that man whom I felt all the time was dangerous to my candid brother. I cannot imagine how blind Jorge has been or what powerful influence that man must exercise over him. (...) I feel that trouble is coming.' ('That man' is almost certainly Raymond L. Stover, of whom more later)