Raymond Holden – författare

An expert’s guide to the skills of the greatest conductorsWhile Weber, Spohr, Mendelssohn, and Berlioz were all conductors of repute, it was the thoughts and practices of Richard Wagner that laid the foundation for the modern virtuoso conductor. Though he was more celebrated for his dramatic operas, Wagner’s experience as a conductor brought a set of practices and principles that affected the interpretations of future generations, and conductors continue to pursue his example today.This book examines Wagner’s conducting career and the principles of his musical performance. It then tracks the central European style through some of the greatest figures of modern music—Nikisch, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Weingartner, Furtwangler, Toscanini, Walter, Klemperer, Beecham, Boult, and others through to von Karajan, Bernstein, and George Szell. In each case Holden, himself a professional classical conductor, traces the rise from apprenticeship to international acclaim, comparing rehearsal technique, the baton, eye contact, repertoire, tempo, recordings, vision, style, and performance practice. The result is a deeply informative, intriguing, and highly readable portrait of the finest exponents of the conducting tradition.

Renowned today as the gifted composer of a string of masterworks, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) is less often remembered for his achievement as a major conductor. Yet he held important conducting posts in Munich, Berlin, and Vienna and influenced generations of younger conductors. This important book is the first to consider Strauss's career as a conductor and place it in relation to his life as a composer. With unique access to extensive materials in the Strauss family's private archives, Raymond Holden corrects misconceptions about Strauss and discusses the musician's understanding of composing and conducting as intertwined processes. Holden throws new light on Strauss's relationships, on his disputed role during the Third Reich, and particularly on his performance practices and principles.

Only recently has it become obvious that conductors' annotated scores and marked orchestral parts are of great cultural, historical and musical importance. In the not-so-distant past, these artefacts had something of an uncertain status with many either languishing unopened in libraries and family archives or simply being dispersed or discarded. With the help of institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music, Harvard University and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra this has begun to change with their extensive collections of these materials now being made available to scholars and musicians. This element examines the emergence of these artefacts as didactic and interpretative tools and explores the ways in which the performance styles of ten iconic conductors active in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries are reflected in their annotated scores and marked orchestral parts of Mozart's Symphony No. 41, K. 551 ('Jupiter').