JAVS Fall 2000

54

VOL. 16 No.3

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN VIOLA SOCIETY

Stravinsky, of course, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov . . . . He was very strong in the standard German repertoire, but he played French music wonderfully, too. We went to New York on the orchestra's fiftieth anniversary, and one critic said 'a great German orchestra' and another critic said 'a great French orchestra'." Stock was especially popular with the musi cians who played under him during the Depression. The orchestra's season then was only twenty-six weeks per year, and Stock went to great lengths to arrange as many extra jobs as he possibly could for the musicians. Preves felt a particular kinship to Stock because Stock was a fellow violist. At one point there were weekly chamber music evenings which Stock attended, and they often played Mozart's string quintets. "Stock would never play first viola. The famous G Minor Quintet has an eight-bar rest for the second viola, and Stock would always miss his entrance. He said, 'There should be a cue there!"' SoLTI's SuccEssoR Preves offers mostly unreserved praise for the musicianship of the CSO's music directors under whom he played: Desire Defauw, Artur Rodzinski (whose one-year tenure was "a stormy one"), Raphael Kubelik, and Jean Martinon, Sir George Solti's immediate prede cessor, who was a violinist and composer as well as a conductor, and whose Symphony No. 4 "Altitude" was composed to include solo parts for most of the CSO's principal players. But the years 1953 to 1963, under Fritz Reiner (about whom more later), were for Preves a golden period, and the orchestra "has clearly reached its peale" under Solti, who is in his twenty-first season with the CSO and will retire after the orchestra's 1OOth season in 1991. He gives a warm vote of confidence, too, to Daniel Barenboim, whose appointment as Music Director Designate and Solti's successor had been announced the day before our dis cussion (after having been a badly-kept secret for months). Barenboim has been a frequent CSO guest conductor for twenty years, and Preves rejects the argument of Chicago's music critics, who uniformly and vociferously pre ferred Claudio Abaddo, that Barenboim, while a fine pianist, is "unseasoned" as a conductor.

Giulini, who served for a time as the CSO's Principal Guest Conductor and remains one of Preves' favorites, as a highlight. He also notes that the last installment of Fritz Reiner's complete recorded cycle of Bartok's orchestral work was the recording of the Viola Concerto with himself as soloist. The viola repertoire has been enriched by a number of compositions written for Preves, notably some pieces by Ernst Bloch. "During Kubelik's reign here, we had a Bloch festival week where I performed the Bloch Suite and got a very nice mention from him about how I did it, thank goodness. At the end of the week I asked him if he would consider writing some pieces for viola along the lines of his Baal Shem suite for violin." Bloch responded a year later with a suite called Five jewish Pieces, three of which he later orchestrated as Suite Hebraique. Two of the five pieces, Meditation and Processiona~ are dedicated to Preves. "I was very honored," he says simply. He also singles out an unaccompanied suite for viola (1953) dedi cated to him by Alan Shulman, "a very fine composer" who was also a cellist with the NBC Symphony. The piece was composed after Preves had for many years championed Shulman's Theme and Variations for Viola and Orchestra, "a gem of a piece." CSO MUSIC DIRECTORS Much of our conversation dealt with the col orful series of music directors who stood on the CSO's podium during Preves's career. He was effulgent in his praise for Frederick Stock, whose tenure lasted until 1942. "He was a great conductor, and a great writer and arranger of music, which most conductors don't do nowadays. In those days, he did all the concerts: popular concerts, children's con certs-well, maybe he took a week or two off during the season, but he was here all year and was very civic-minded, which is another unusual thing. And in those days we had the reputation of having the biggest repertoire of any orchestra in the country. Stock would start the season, I remember, rehearsing with a pile of newly composed music, and we would just read it, and if he didn't like something he would drop it on the floor. But a lot of music was performed. He would invite composers to conduct their own works, as well-Milhaud,

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