February 19 Great Jewish Conductors program

We will listen to excerpts from recordings by these great conductors. The music will include works by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Shostakovich, Vaughn Williams, Bernstein, and Rosner.

Among the conductors to be featured are several under whose direction I have played, and one, Leonard Slatkin, was my student in the John Burroughs Junior High School Orchestra.  I gave Slatkin his first conducting experience, leading the school orchestra in Morton Gould’s Pavanne.

During the summer of 1950, when I was a participant at the Berkshire Music Festival in Tanglewood, MA, our student orchestra performed one concert conducted by the Russian-born Serge Koussevitzky, the revered maestro of the Boston Symphony and the director of the festival. We also performed two concerts under the baton of then rising star, Leonard Bernstein. While a member of the San Diego Symphony, I played for eight years under the direction of the brilliant Israeli conductor, Yoav Talmi. I will be introducing those three great conductors. I will also be introducing two greats who escaped from Hitler’s Germany, William Steinberg, who worked with the Palestine Orchestra when it was first established by violinist Bronislaw Huberman; and Andre Previn, who settled in Los Angeles, where I heard him as a 16- year -old master pianist with Peter Meremblum’s California Junior Symphony and watched his career take off.

David Amos will be introducing two Hungarian-born conductors, Georg Szell of the Cleveland Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He will also introduce the Argentinian-born Israeli conductor, Daniel Barenboim, of the Chicago Symphony.  In addition, Amos will tell a bit about his own conducting career and introduce an excerpt from one of his own recordings.

Bob Gilson will introduce the German-born Bruno Walter, another refugee from Nazi Germany; Hungarian-born Georg Solti of the Chicago Symphony; Michael Tilson-Thomas of the San Francisco Symphony; and Gilson’s classmate in Junior High and High School, Leonard Slatkin, of the Detroit Symphony.

There are many other great Jewish conductors that we are not able to include in this program, such as Otto Klemperer, Erich Leinsdorf, Maurice Abravanel,  Lorin Maazel, and Gary Bertini, because of time constraints.

Of my two guests, David Amos founded the Jewish Community Symphony 52 years ago at the old 52^nd St. JCC. When it moved to Tifereth Israel Synagogue, it was renamed Tifereth Israel Community Orchestra (TICO), but now, newly housed at the Lawrence Family JCC, it is the Jewish Community Symphony. The orchestra is made up of amateur musicians and retired professionals who donate their time and talents, inspired by Amos and his assistant, clarinetist and conductor, Robert Zelickman.

David has made over thirty highly praised recordings, mostly of lesser-known works, with some of the finest orchestras in the world, such as those of London, Scotland, Israel, Russia, Poland, and Slovakia.

Bob Gilson has been the Music Director of the San Diego Civic Youth Orchestra for over three decades. During this tenure, he has taken the youth orchestra on international tours to eleven different European countries, to the South Pacific, to Australia, and to New Zealand. Two years ago, the orchestra participated in the Viennese Masters Invitational Orchestra Festival at Carnegie Hall.

Gilson joined the staff of Palomar College in 1973, where he served as Conductor, Chairperson of the Music Department, and Chairperson of the Performing Arts Department. He retired in 2007 and now holds the title of Professor Emeritus. He was also the Music Director of the Palomar Community Orchestra from 1974 until his retirement. Bob’s devotion to youth through music brings me special pride because I started Bob on the clarinet in the Beginning Winds Class at John Burroughs Junior High School.

This promises to be a memorable program, giving insights into the lives of famous Jewish conductors and listening to the beautiful music they produced.