Arthur Fiedler
Easily the most popular conductor of his era, Arthur Fiedler was classical music's greatest ambassador since Mozart, and also one of those rare conductors whose records were not only successful, but serious profit centers, both for his orchestra and his record labels. Without regard to cultural and economic barriers, he promoted symphonic music for the enjoyment and appreciation of all listeners, programming pieces by everyone from Pachelbel to Gershwin to the Beatles and the Bee Gees. Born December 17, 1894 in Boston, Massachusetts, Fiedler was the son of a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra; at the age of 15, he traveled to Berlin to study under the virtuoso Willy Hess, and while there, he also explored chamber music and conducting, in the process gaining an intimate knowledge of the Western European classical tradition. By 1915, Fiedler was back in the U.S., signing on to the Boston Symphony as a violinist; however, his own desires to conduct prompted him to form the Arthur Fiedler Sinfonietta, a tiny orchestra comprising other top BSO players.
With the Sinfonietta, Fiedler introduced his legendary Esplanade Concerts along the banks of the Charles River; the first such American performances of their kind, they combined classical and popular music to appeal to the widest audiences imaginable, and in the years to follow, became a staple of Boston culture, to this day continuing to draw hundreds of thousands of people each year. In 1930, Fiedler was appointed to the conductor's post of the Boston Pops Orchestra, the summer season incarnation of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (excluding their first-chair players). The Pops was already an established institution in Boston, but Fiedler took them further in the direction of popular music, adding show tunes and other material from beyond the concert hall to the waltzes, polkas, and other light classics already in their repertory. This wasn't always easy, as many of the players came from European backgrounds and, as he discovered, were snobbish about music (and, especially, American music). According to his daughter Johanna, he was compelled to explain that there was "no bad music, only boring music," and that was sometimes the fault of players who didn't embrace it; and that they were now playing in America, for American audiences, and would have to adapt.
He held the podium at the Pops for a half-century and turned them into one of the best-known orchestras in the United States. In contrast to most other conductors of his era, who regarded recording as a necessary if unpleasant obligation, Fiedler embraced recorded music and used it to sell music and the Pops to tens of millions who never got anywhere near Boston. One of the more enduring successes of his early career came in 1940, with the Sinfonietta's release of the first-ever recording of Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D, reintroducing to the world a piece of music that would become one of the most widely known works of the Baroque era. The Pops (like the Boston Symphony) were associated with RCA Victor and became a cash cow, not just for their parent orchestra but also for the record label; they were prevailed upon to record as much as possible, often re-doing the same pieces multiple times as technology advanced. In 1950, Fiedler's recording of Manuel Rosenthal's Offenbach pastiche Gaite Parisienne became the first long-playing record ever issued by RCA Victor, and they re-recorded the piece in stereo in 1954, long before that format was established. Their albums had sufficient mass appeal to be used as membership premiums in print advertisements for the RCA Record Club.
Fiedler & the Pops made the leap to multimedia entertainment in 1970 with Evening at the Pops on the PBS network, which offered a featured guest (usually a singer or soloist) each week in tandem with the orchestra. Fiedler's avuncular persona and his sense of humor lent themselves to proceedings that, depending on the guest, ranged from the sublimely beautiful (Judy Collins) to the delightfully ridiculous (Prof. Peter Schickele, aka P.D.Q. Bach), and sometimes both at once (the Muppets). He sometimes seemed more like a ringmaster than conductor, and became a star himself in that role, profiled on national television in his seventies. By that time, the Pops -- in tandem with the Boston Symphony -- had switched labels to Deutsche Grammophon. Fiedler had always kept a finger on the pulse of popular music -- in 1964, he was putting Lennon-McCartney songs into the Pops' repertory -- and his final album, released in 1979, was entitled Saturday Night Fiedler and presented him on the cover dressed like John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. It might have provoked gasps from some purists, but it did sell, and it may even have gotten some disco listeners to try the Pops' brand of music. Part of the secret of his 50 years of success was that he always engaged top talent behind the scenes: the orchestra's quality was a given, but he also employed talented arrangers, most notably Leroy Anderson, himself later an established composer of light classics; the Pops' renditions of show tunes, rock songs, and even disco numbers were often entertaining, never less than interesting, and sometimes enlightening. In all, he was probably the most recorded conductor, and the Pops the most recorded orchestra of their time, with over 50 million sales of the albums.
Fiedler was a tough act to follow. At the time of his death on July 10, 1979, the Pops had become so important to the orchestra and PBS, that it was necessary to find someone who already had a following. Composer/conductor John Williams, who had soared to fame before the public with his music for the movies Jaws, Star Wars (and its sequels), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, achieving a recognition level equivalent to that of many movie stars, became his chosen successor in 1980.
© Bruce Eder & Jason Ankeny /TiVo
Artistas semelhantes
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Classics For Children - Prokofiev: Peter And The Wolf / Saint-Saëns: Carnival Of The Animals / Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker Suite
Children - Lançado por RCA Gold Seal em 01/01/1959
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Tchaikovsky: Overture "1812"; Romeo and Julia; Marche Slave Op.31; Capriccio italien Op.45
Arthur Fiedler, Seiji Ozawa, Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich
Classical - Lançado por Deutsche Grammophon (DG) em 01/01/2001
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Offenbach, Rosenthal: Gaîté parisienne (Mono Version)
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler
Classical - Lançado por BNF Collection em 01/01/1953
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Irish Night At The Pops
Classical - Lançado por RCA Victor em 01/06/1966
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Marches In Hi Fi
Classical - Lançado por Living Stereo em 10/05/1993
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Grieg: Greatest Hits
Classical - Lançado por RCA Red Seal em 06/09/1991
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Arthur Fiedler meets Boston Pops Orchestra
Arthur Fiedler, Boston Pops Orchestra
Film Soundtracks - Lançado por Masterclassics em 03/03/2017
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Fiedler Encores (Sibelius, Smetana, Dvorak, Verdi...)
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler
Symphonic Music - Lançado por Universal Music Australia Pty. Ltd. em 01/01/1978
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Dance Of The Hours (Shellacks Recordings of 1935 - 1939)
Arthur Fiedler, Boston Pops Orchestra
Classical - Lançado por POPS em 14/12/2022
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Hi-Fi Fiedler (Album of 1959)
Arthur Fiedler, Boston Pops Orchestra
Pop - Lançado por Light Music em 31/12/2020
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Legends: Arthur Fiedler & The Boston Pops
Pop - Lançado por Quimbaya Entretenimiento SAS em 23/11/2017
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The Christmas Masterpiece - Classics Christmas Carols
Mitch Miller, Arthur Fiedler, Boston Pops Orchestra
Classical - Lançado por X-Max Tree em 26/11/2021
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Music of Franz Liszt (Album of 1960)
Arthur Fiedler, Boston Pops Orchestra
Pop - Lançado por Light Music em 31/12/2020
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Pierné: Marche des petits soldats de plomb - Schubert: Marche militaire No. 1 (Orchestral Version, Mono Version)
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler
Miscellaneous - Lançado por BNF Collection em 01/01/1952
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Gershwin: Concerto for Piano in F Major, Variations On "I Got Rhythm" & Cuban Overture (Mono Version)
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler, Earl Wild
Miscellaneous - Lançado por BNF Collection em 01/01/1962
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
The Great Conductors: Arthur Fiedler – Gala Night with the Boston Pops Orchestra (Remastered 2016)
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler
Cinema Music - Lançado por Jube Classic em 07/10/2016
24-Bit 48.0 kHz - Stereo -
J. Strauss II: Unter Donner und Blitz & Perpetuum mobile (Mono Version)
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler
Miscellaneous - Lançado por BNF Collection em 01/01/1953
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Singer II, Strauss: Valses du Chevalier à la rose - Gounod: Valse de Faust (Mono Version)
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler
Classical - Lançado por BNF Collection em 01/01/1957
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Liszt: Rhapsodie hongroise No. 1 - Brahms: Danse hongroise No. 2 (Mono Version)
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler
Miscellaneous - Lançado por BNF Collection em 01/01/1953
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Pops Christmas Party
The Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler
Pop - Lançado por In Vinyl We Trust em 06/10/2023
24-Bit 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue & Un américain à Paris (Mono Version)
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler, Earl Wild
Miscellaneous - Lançado por BNF Collection em 01/01/1960
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo