Franco Autori

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Franco Autori (born November 29, 1903 in Naples as Franco Autoriello , † October 10, 1990 in Tulsa ) was an American conductor with Italian roots.

life and career

At the age of six he had already decided to take up the profession of conductor, as he said in an interview in 1967. In his own words, the reason for this was a visit to the opera Aida to which his parents had taken him. His parents came from a professional background and worked at various theaters in Venice , Naples, Catania and Genoa while in his youth he studied music and conducting with Pietro Mascagni and Riccardo Zandonai .

After completing his studies, Autoriello first conducted opera orchestras in Europe, including as an assistant to his mentor Pietro Mascagni, composer of the opera Cavalleria rusticana , who advised him to change his name to Autori after Mascagni learned of Autoriello's plan to emigrate to the United States . After immigrating to the United States in 1928, Autori initially exclusively conducted various opera orchestras, including the Chicago Civic Opera as music director from 1929 to 1934 . When he was head of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in the summer seasons from 1932 to 1934 , from then on his interests shifted more to conducting symphonies.

As part of the of Roosevelt initiated the New Deal during the Great Depression came in 1935 to the founding of the Federal Music Project , gave the unemployed among other musicians to newly created at this time orchestra. From this organization, in which Autorri had also registered, he was referred to the newly founded Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936 and received US citizenship in the same year. After the expiration of the one-year contract, the members of the ensemble signed a petition for the continued engagement of Autoris as music director. After Lajos Shuk's one-year guest performance , who had the merit of shaping the Buffalo Philharmonic into a harmonic orchestra, Autori was the first music director of the ensemble, which he then led for eight years. A highlight of his time in Buffalo was the gala concert on October 12, 1940, which he performed on the occasion of the inauguration of the Kleinhans Music Hall with his own orchestral adaptation of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 , a violin concerto by Beethoven with Eudice Shapiro as a soloist and most recently gave Brahms' epic First Piano Concerto .

Autori's contribution to the artistic level and economic stability of the BPO cannot be overestimated. Before he passed his baton on to William Steinberg , a student of Arturo Toscanini, in 1945 , he had turned the orchestra into one of the most recognized classical ensembles in the USA. With the premiere of Copland's Lincoln Portrait and Carl Sandburg as the narrator , Franco Autori said goodbye as music director of the orchestra in the spring of 1945. Autori returned twice to his old place of work as a guest conductor. The first time in 1970 and the second time in 1985, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Buffalo Philharmonic.

After Autori left Buffalo, he took on the position of assistant at Toscanini at the newly founded NBC Symphony Orchestra , at the same time conducted the state radio symphony orchestra in Buenos Aires as a guest conductor and worked at the National Philharmonic in Warsaw from 1947 to 1948 at the invitation of the Polish Minister of Culture . In addition, he was music director of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra in the summer season until 1953 and guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos and Leonard Bernstein until 1959 .

Autori was a guest conductor with the Tulsa Philharmonic in 1958, 1959 and 1960 , before finally leading the orchestra as music director in 1961. In 1971, Autori retired, but retained his Tulsa residence and remained associated with the orchestra until his death.

Autori's parents were S Michelangelo Autoriello and Marta nee Martucci. He was married twice. From 1928 to December 1946 with Paola Lawn and from January 17, 1948 with the Polish pianist Lygia Berezynska.

Trivia

The script for the successful 1934 musical One Night of Love starring Grace Moore and Tullio Carminati is said to be based on a short romance Autoris with a young opera singer and it is rumored that Grace Moore played herself in it

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b David C. MacKenzie: Franco Autori, Philharmonic Conductor Laureate, Dies. Tulso World, October 17, 1990, accessed March 1, 2017 .
  2. ^ A b Franco Autori Orchestra Conductor. praboqk, accessed March 4, 2017 .
  3. ^ WPA Federal Art Project. Retrieved February 28, 2017 (English).
  4. ^ A b c Franco Autori BPO Music Director: 1936-1945. Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra archive, accessed March 7, 2017 .
  5. ^ Kleinhans Music Hall Home of The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. (No longer available online.) BPO Archives, July 29, 2003, archived from the original on November 2, 2011 ; accessed on March 7, 2017 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.music.buffalo.edu
  6. ↑ Chris Pasles: Eudice Shapiro, 93; violinist who made history in Hollywood. Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2007, accessed March 7, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Autori, Franco
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Autoriello, Franco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American conductor
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Naples
DATE OF DEATH October 10, 1990
Place of death Tulsa