On Tuesday, January 16, 2007, the classical music world will remember the legacy of the legendary conductor, Arturo Toscanini on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
Conductor Lorin Maazel, bass soloist Rene Pape, the New York Philharmonic, and Italy's Symphonica Toscanini will pay tribute to the late maestro with arias from Mozart's Don Giovanni, Verdi's Don Carlo and Macbeth, and Resphighi's Pines of Rome, R. Strauss' Don Juan, and Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini.
At Carnegie Hall, Peter Tiboris will lead the Manhattan Philharmonic, the Philharmonique Choir of Montreal, Connecticut Choral Society, and the New Jersey Choral Society in Verdi's Messa da Requiem.
Although we may remember Toscanini from his later years as conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, he got his start as a cellist and an opera conductor at La Scala. As artistic director of La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera, he imposed strict, exacting standards on every aspect of operatic performance; this involved coaching the singers, improving the ensemble acting, overseeing the staging, and raising the audience's level of understanding and appreciation. He not only conducted the premieres of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892, Milan) and Puccini’s La Bohème (1896, Turin), but received the highest accolade for a particular performance of Falstaff from Verdi himself with the message ‘Grazie! grazie! grazie!’.
The compact disc Le Festin de L'Araignée is a compilation of NBC radio broadcasts in New York between November 12, 1938 and March 27, 1948. His 1949 recording of Verdi's Aida with Herva Nelli, Eva Gustavson, Richard Tucker, Giuseppe Valdengo, and Norman Scott may also be sampled.
To gain a greater understanding of this demanding, imperious, uncompromising perfectionist and genius, one may read Mortimer H. Frank's Arturo Toscanini : The NBC Years, George Richard Marek's Toscanini, Harvey Sachs' Reflections on Toscanini, or Arturo Toscanini's correspondence in The Letters of Arturo Toscanini.