Elisabeth Höngen (7 December 1906 – 7 August 1997) was a German operatic mezzo-soprano and singing-actress. She was particularly associated with Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss roles, and with Verdi's Lady Macbeth. From 1947 onward she was one of the Vienna State Opera's most prominent artists for nearly 30 years.
Maurice Gendron (26 December 1920, near Nice – 20 August 1990, Grez-sur-Loing) was a French cellist, conductor and teacher. He is widely considered one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century. He was an Officer of the Legion of Honor and a recipient of the National Order of Merit. He was an active member of the French Resistance during World War II.Gendron recorded most of the standard concerto repertoire with conductors such as Bernard Haitink, Raymond Leppard, and Pablo Casals (the only cellist to appear on a commercial recording under Casals's baton), and with orchestras such as the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He also recorded the sonata repertoire with pianists such as Philippe Entremont and Jean Françaix. For 25 years he was a member of a celebrated piano trio with Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin.
He also made a famous recording (earning an Edison Award) of J. S. Bach's solo cello suites.Gendron played with many musical stars of his time, including Benjamin Britten, Dinu Lipatti and Rudolf Serkin. The 1693 Stradivarius he played, which has become known as the ex-Gendron cello, was subsequently on loan to German cellist Maria Kliegel.
Gendron taught at the Musikhochschule Saarbrücken, the Yehudi Menuhin School and at the Paris Conservatoire. His students include Colin Carr, Chu Yibing and Jacqueline du Pré. In 2013 a former student alleged that Gendron was abusive toward young students during his time at the Yehudi Menuhin School in the '60s and '70s. Richard Hillier, the headmaster at YMS, has said he is aware of the allegations but that according to school documents, no concerns were raised about Gendron's behaviour. Other students of Gendron have described him as a very strict, even problematic teacher, but an influential one.Gendron was the first modern cellist to record Boccherini's Concerto in B-flat in its original form (he discovered the original manuscript in the Dresden State Library) instead of Grützmacher's version. This recording has been widely acclaimed by critics and is considered a classic.
He gave the first Western performance of Prokofiev's Cello Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Walter Susskind, and was subsequently given exclusive rights to the piece's performance for 3 years.
His approach to cello playing is summed up in his book "L'Art du Violoncelle", written in collaboration with Walter Grimmer and published in 1999 by Schott [ED 9176; ISMN M-001-12682-3].
Gendron is the father of the actor François-Éric Gendron.Apart from several other currently available recordings, in 2015 Decca launched a 14-CD boxset, "L’Art de Maurice Gendron" (catalogue number 4823849), which comprises all his recordings for Decca and Philips in addition to some of his most relevant work for EMI.
Louis Charles Augustin Georges Trenet (French pronunciation: [lwi ʃaʁl oɡystɛ̃ ʒɔʁʒ tʁenɛ]; 18 May 1913 – 19 February 2001) was a renowned French singer-songwriter who composed both the music and the lyrics to nearly 1,000 songs over a career that lasted more than 60 years. These songs include "Boum!" (1938), "La Mer" (1946) and "Nationale 7" (1955). Trenet is noted for his work with musicians Michel Emer and Léo Chauliac, with whom he recorded "Y'a d'la joie" (1938) for the first and "La Romance de Paris" (1941) and "Douce France" (1947) for the latter. He was awarded an Honorary Molière Award in 2000.
Thomas Stewart (August 29, 1928 – September 24, 2006) was an American bass-baritone who sang an unusually wide range of roles, earning global acclaim particularly for his performances in Wagner's operas.
Thomas James Stewart was born in San Saba, Texas. He graduated from Baylor University in 1953 and then went to the Juilliard School, where he studied with Mack Harrell. An imposing six-footer, Stewart made his debut in 1954 as La Roche in the American premiere of Richard Strauss's Capriccio, going on to sing with the New York City Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
He married soprano Evelyn Lear in 1955, and the following year the couple participated in a studio recording of Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson, first produced in 1936. In May 1957 he created the role of Dioneo in the world premiere of Carlos Chávez's The Visitors. Later that year he and his wife traveled to Berlin on Fulbright Scholarships. In 1958 he made his major-role debut as Escamillo in Bizet's Carmen with the Städtische Opera, now the Deutsche Oper Berlin. He created the role of Jupiter in Giselher Klebe's 1961 opera Alkmene and remained on the Berlin company's roster until 1964. He debuted at the Royal Opera House in 1960, again as Escamillo, and sang frequently at Covent Garden until 1978, with roles including Golaud in Pelléas et Mélisande, Gunther in Götterdämmerung, and the title roles in Don Giovanni and The Flying Dutchman.
A regular at the Bayreuth Festival for 13 years (1960–72), Stewart sang most of Wagner's heroic baritone roles, including Wotan/Wanderer and Gunther in the Ring Cycle, the Dutchman, Wolfram in Tannhäuser, and Amfortas in Parsifal. He sang the latter role for 13 consecutive Bayreuth seasons.
In 1967 Herbert von Karajan launched the Salzburg Easter Festival with a new staging of the Ring Cycle, casting Stewart as Wotan/Wanderer and Gunther during the festival’s first four seasons, and again as Wotan in a later revival of Das Rheingold. Karajan recorded all four operas from the cycle with the Texas baritone, and Time Magazine acclaimed him "the Wotan of his generation."
Stewart made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Ford in Verdi's Falstaff in 1966. Over the next decade he figured in many stage and broadcast performances as the Met's leading Wagner baritone (Wotan/Wanderer, Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger, Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde, Amfortas, Wolfram, the Dutchman, Gunther). He also sang a variety of other roles: Golaud, Jochanaan in Salome, Orest in Elektra, Iago in Verdi's Otello, Balstrode in Peter Grimes, the four villains in Contes d'Hoffmann, as well as Mozart's Almaviva and Don Giovanni. He returned to that house annually until 1976, then less regularly but still frequently thereafter; the Met database lists his last season with the house as 1993–94.
With the San Francisco Opera he sang the title role in the American premiere of Aribert Reimann's Lear (1981). At the same house he also sang several French and Italian roles (Golaud, Valentin in Faust, Posa in Don Carlos, both Ford and the title role in Falstaff), as well as major Wagnerian roles (Wotan/Wanderer, Gunther, Wolfram, Kurwenal, Amfortas). He received a medal from that company in 1985 for his 25 years of distinguished performance.
In his prime years Stewart also returned to Lyric Opera of Chicago to sing the Dutchman and Hans Sachs, as well as Orest, Ford, and Mozart's Almaviva. At other houses worldwide, his better-known roles also included Scarpia in Tosca, Renato in Un ballo in maschera, di Luna in Il trovatore, Amonasro in Aida, and the title roles in Rigoletto and Eugene Onegin.
In later years, he and his wife ran the Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart Emerging Singers Program of the Wagner Society of Washington, D.C.
Thomas Stewart died of a heart attack while playing golf near his home in Rockville, Maryland, aged 78. He was survived by his two children and his wife, who died in 2012.
Jan Willem van Otterloo (27 December 1907 – 27 July 1978) was a Dutch conductor, cellist and composer.
Karl Münchinger (29 May 1915 – 13 March 1990) was a German conductor of European classical music. He helped to revive the now-ubiquitous Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel, through recording it with his Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in 1960. (Jean-François Paillard made a rival, and also very popular, recording of the same piece at around the same time.) Münchinger is also noted for restoring baroque traditions to the interpretation of Bach's oeuvre, his greatest musical love — moderate-sized forces, judicious ornamentation, and rhythmic sprightliness, though not on "period instruments".
Born in Stuttgart, Münchinger studied at the Hochschule für Musik in his home city. At first, he guest-conducted often, supporting himself also with other duties as an organist and church choir director. In 1941, he became principal conductor of the Hanover Symphony, a post he held for the next two years. He held no other conducting position until the end of World War II.
The year that the war ended, he founded the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester (Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra), which he built into an impressive touring ensemble; it made its Paris debut in 1949 and its American debut in San Francisco in 1953. Under his leadership the orchestra issued (for the Decca label) numerous recordings, mostly during the 1950s and 1960s, and mostly of Bach's output; these included the Brandenburg Concertos (three times), the orchestral suites, the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion, The Musical Offering, and the Christmas Oratorio. Of his and the ensemble's non-Bach releases, probably the best — and certainly the most famous, other than the Pachelbel performance mentioned earlier — is that of Haydn's The Creation.
In 1977, the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra became the first German ensemble to visit the People's Republic of China. Münchinger retired in 1988, two years before his death.
Stylistically, Münchinger's approach with his orchestra was rather similar to those of his somewhat younger contemporaries Raymond Leppard, Sir Neville Marriner, Claudio Scimone, and the above-mentioned Paillard, though displaying an extra element of tonal solidity — not to mention a fierce rigor during rehearsals as well as performances — which might be considered Teutonic. With the increased fashionability of 18th-century instruments, from the 1970s onward, Münchinger's interpretations fell dramatically from critical favor and were often dismissed as "passé", though he always showed himself to be a fine, tough, disciplined, and sensitive musician. There have been more profoundly imaginative German conductors than Münchinger, but there have been very few who matched his consistently high standards.
Michel Descombey (28 October 1930 – 5 December 2011) was a French ballet dancer, choreographer and director.
Descombay studied dancing in Paris, and debuted as a professional dancer of the Ballet de l'Opéra National in 1947. In 1959 he became premier danseur, then ballet master, and official choreographer and finally director of the company from 1962 to 1969. He also established the training ballet group of the Opéra National de Paris. Afterwards he was ballet director of the Zürcher Ballett of the Zurich Opera from 1971 to 1973, and was invited to Mexico by Orozco. In 1975 he settled down in Mexico, where he became chief choreographer and associate director of the Ballet Teatro del Espacio in 1977. He was a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (SNCA).
Wolfgang Borchert (German: [ˈvɔlfɡaŋ ˈbɔʁçɐt]; 20 May 1921 – 20 November 1947) was a German author and playwright whose work was strongly influenced by his experience of dictatorship and his service in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. His work is among the best-known examples of the Trümmerliteratur movement in post-World War II Germany. His most famous work is the drama Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside), which he wrote soon after the end of World War II. His works are uncompromising on the issues of humanity and humanism. He is one of the most popular authors of the German postwar period; his work continues to be studied in German schools.
Gilbert Bécaud (French pronunciation: [ʒil.bɛːʁ be.ko], 24 October 1927 – 18 December 2001) was a French singer, composer, pianist and actor, known as "Monsieur 100,000 Volts" for his energetic performances. His best-known hits are "Nathalie" and "Et maintenant", a 1961 release that became an English language hit as "What Now My Love". He remained a popular artist for nearly fifty years, identifiable in his dark blue suits, with a white shirt and "lucky tie"; blue with white polka dots. When asked to explain his gift he said, "A flower doesn't understand botany." His favourite venue was the Paris Olympia under the management of Bruno Coquatrix. He debuted there in 1954 and headlined in 1955, attracting 6,000 on his first night, three times the capacity. On 13 November 1997, Bécaud was present for the re-opening of the venue after its reconstruction.
John Browning (May 23, 1933 – January 26, 2003) was an American pianist known for his reserved, elegant style and sophisticated interpretations of Bach and Scarlatti and for his collaboration with the American composer Samuel Barber.