You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘World War II’ tag.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra family notes with sorrow the passing of Rudolph “Rudy” Nashan, a member of the trumpet section from 1950 until 1963. He died on August 9, 2017, at the age of 94.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra trumpet section in the fall of 1950: left to right, Renold Schilke, Gerald Huffman, Rudolph Nashan, and Adolph Herseth
Nashan was born in Münster, Germany on July 25, 1923, and the family soon immigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago. He began playing the trumpet in elementary school and continued lessons while attending Lane Tech. Nashan was a member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago from 1941 until 1943, and following the outbreak of World War II, in 1942 he joined the U.S. Army, serving in a military band in Skokie, Illinois. During his service, he worked not only as a trumpeter but also as a translator for incoming German war prisoners who had been transported to the United States as farm laborers from South Africa.
After the war, Nashan attended the New England Conservatory of Music and studied with Georges C. Mager, then principal trumpet of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Shortly after receiving his performer’s certificate, new music director Rafael Kubelík invited him to join the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as second trumpet, where he served for ten years, moving to fourth trumpet in 1960.
As a tireless advocate for the rights of musicians, in 1962 Nashan was one of the founding members of the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians. He resigned his post with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1963 when he was elected vice president of the Chicago Federation of Musicians, where he was instrumental in completing the merger of the segregated Chicago locals.
Nashan later worked as an artist representative for the National Endowment for the Arts for the New England area and also served as principal trumpet and personnel manager of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. Upon his retirement, he and his wife Catherine moved to Belfast, Maine, where he taught several young trumpeters privately and at local colleges. Nashan was a longtime member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Alumni Association.
His first wife Catherine preceded him in death. Nashan is survived by his second wife Patricia and two children from his first marriage, Rebecca Devereaux and Georges Nashan. Service details are pending.
In 2012, ICSOM held its fiftieth anniversary meeting in Chicago and to commemorate the event, a documentary was produced. Nashan was one of several Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians prominently featured in the film, offering first-hand accounts of working conditions in orchestras in the early years.
____________________________________________________
On February 11, 1943, Edward L. Ryerson, president of the Orchestral Association, announced that Désiré Defauw would become the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s third music director, beginning with the 1943–44 season. The Belgian conductor had made his debut with the Orchestra only a month before, leading one program of subscription concerts on January 7 and 8 (Wagner’s Overture to The Flying Dutchman, Debussy’s Clouds and Festivals from Nocturnes, Franck’s Le chasseur maudit, and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony) and a Popular Concert on January 9 (Weber’s Overture to Euryanthe, Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela from Four Legends of the Kalevala, selections from Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony).
Defauw’s years with the Orchestra coincided with the time when American involvement in World War II was at its peak, an unsettled era when musicians were off to war (making room for more women to join orchestras) and servicemen were able to hear concerts for free when seats were unsold or empty. Patriotism was in high gear and the Stars and Stripes became a permanent fixture over the stage of Orchestra Hall. For the first concerts of the fifty-fifth season on October 4 and 5, 1945—the first downtown concerts following the end of the war—Defauw led the Orchestra in the national anthems of the Allied nations: China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Music director Désiré Defauw and the Orchestra onstage on October 12, 1943
Serving for four seasons through 1946–47, Defauw introduced Chicago audiences to the works of several contemporary composers, including Barber, Bloch, Carpenter, Chadwick, Copland, Elgar, Goldmark, Milhaud, Sibelius, Walton, and Warlock. For RCA, Defauw and the Orchestra recorded a wide variety of repertoire, including works by Borodin, Franck, Grétry, Handel, Prokofiev, Respighi, Smetana, and Stravinsky, along with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with Mischa Elman, Strauss’s Burleske and Weber’s Konzertstück with Claudio Arrau, and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Erica Morini.
This article also appears here.
____________________________________________________
Nineteen-year-old Isaac Stern first appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on January 11 and 12, 1940. Frederick Stock conducted an all-Sibelius program, and Stern was soloist in the Violin Concerto.
According to the Chicago Daily News, “Dr. Frederick Stock had been invited to conduct the Sibelius concert with the Helsingfors Orchestra [arranged when Stock visited Sibelius in Finland the previous summer] as a special feature of the Olympic Games.* But Finland has had to abandon peacetime pursuits and now Isaac can thank the Russian regime for both his American citizenship and the chance to play the Sibelius D minor concerto with one of the world’s great orchestras.”
“True to the topsy-turvy condition of the world we live in, while the Finns are playing havoc with the Russians, at home a Russian-born violinist, young Isaac Stern, was the sensation of Mr. Stock’s memorable Sibelius concert at Orchestra Hall last night,” wrote Claudia Cassidy in the Journal of Commerce. “[Stern] has a commanding and comprehensive technique, a bold and beautiful tone never blatant and he has an urgent intensity of projection that seems to start in his firmly planted heels and flow like fire into the hands that make his music. . . . Stock’s accompaniment was brilliant in the perceptive richness that makes so many soloists prefer him to any other conductor.”
Isaac Stern and music director designate Daniel Barenboim after the Centennial Gala concert on October 6, 1990 (Jim Steere photo)
Over the course of the next fifty-two years, Stern was one of the Orchestra’s most frequent guests at Orchestra Hall, the Ravinia Festival, and at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, performing under six music directors (Stock, Rafael Kubelík, Fritz Reiner, Jean Martinon, Sir Georg Solti, and Daniel Barenboim) and a variety of guest conductors, including Fritz Busch, Andrew Davis, Carlo Maria Giulini, Otto Klemperer, Josef Krips, Pierre Monteux, Eugene Ormandy, Seiji Ozawa, and Leonard Slatkin. In 1986, Stern and Yo-Yo Ma recorded Brahms’s Concerto for Violin and Cello with Claudio Abbado for CBS.
*On July 16, 1938, a year after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, it was announced that the 1940 Summer Olympics would not be held in Tokyo, as originally scheduled. The International Olympic Committee then awarded the games to Helsinki, the runner-up city in the original bidding process. However, following the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, the Olympic Games were indefinitely suspended and did not resume until 1948.
This article also appears here.
The title page of Frederick Stock’s post-1917 arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner, the version currently used by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
On September 14, 2014, we celebrate the bicentennial of The Star-Spangled Banner, the national anthem of the United States of America. For many of us, most of the story is familiar, but did you know that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, like many American orchestras, played a role in promoting the song’s popularity?
The first flute part of Stock’s arrangement—slightly different from the score pictured above—indicates a minor rhythmic modification
In the midst of the War of 1812, thirty-five-year-old lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key witnessed the brutal twenty-five-hour attack on Fort McHenry in Chesapeake Bay by the British Navy that continued through the night of September 13, 1814. Early the next morning, Key’s sight of the U.S. flag—then fifteen stars and fifteen stripes—still flying over the fort inspired him to write the four-verse lyric Defence of Fort McHenry.
During the U.S. involvement in World War II (1941–1945), the forty-eight-star flag was a permanent fixture on the Orchestra Hall stage.
Contrary to many accounts, Key certainly had The Anacreontic Song (the song of a popular gentleman’s club in London), composed by John Stafford Smith, in mind when he wrote his lyric. After he completed it on September 16, it was printed as a broadside and initially distributed to the soldiers who had defended Fort McHenry. The first documented performance was a month later at the Baltimore Theatre.
Sir Georg Solti’s 1986 account of the National Anthem featuring the Chicago Symphony Chorus
Frederick Stock recorded his 1917 version with the CSO for the Columbia Graphophone Company
During the nineteenth century, the song’s popularity grew and it was widely performed at public celebrations and as accompaniment to the raising of the flag. On the eve of U.S. involvement in World War I, President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 ordered the song to be played at military and other notable events. Wilson also directed the U.S. Bureau of Education to compile an official version; the bureau tasked five musicians—Walter Damrosch, Will Earhart, Arnold J. Gantvoort, Oscar Sonneck, and John Philip Sousa—to develop and agree upon a standardized edition. (An appraisal of one of the standardization manuscripts, featured on an episode of Antiques Roadshow, can be seen here.) Damrosch conducted the premiere of that version with the Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall on December 5, 1917.
Frederick Stock—the CSO’s second music director from 1905 until 1942—on the podium in Orchestra Hall in the 1930s
Almost simultaneously, Frederick Stock—the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s second music director from 1905 until 1942—made his own orchestration of the Banner along with America (My Country ’Tis of Thee) and recorded both of them with the Orchestra for the Columbia Graphophone Company on May 28, 1917. And keeping with the emerging popular custom (as evidenced in newspaper accounts and end-of-season indexes), the Orchestra performed the song at the beginning of all concerts during U.S. involvement in World War I, even though the song was rarely listed on program pages—a practice that continues today.
Although the tradition had become firmly established, President Herbert Hoover made it official on March 3, 1931, and signed into law that The Star-Spangled Banner was to be the national anthem of the United States of America. And during the U.S. involvement in the Second World War, Stock and later his successor Désiré Defauw continued the practice of performing The Star-Spangled Banner at the beginning of every concert.
Program page from the first concert of the fifty-fifth season on October 4 and 5, 1945—the first downtown CSO concerts following the end of World War II—at which music director Désiré Defauw conducted the national anthems of the Allied nations: China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Currently, The Star-Spangled Banner generally is performed at the beginning of the first concert of both the Orchestra Hall and Ravinia Festival seasons in addition to Symphony Ball and Ravinia’s annual gala. One notable exception: Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra were in Lucerne, Switzerland, on September 11, 2001, scheduled to perform Mahler’s Seventh Symphony that evening, only a few brief hours after the terrorist attacks in the U.S. At the beginning of the concert, Barenboim addressed the audience and announced that the Orchestra would begin the concert with the American National Anthem, “for tonight we are all of us Americans.”
Following the recording in 1917, Stock modified his orchestration, perhaps to conform to the standardized version. Stock’s version, with minor modifications, was later recorded by Fritz Reiner (the Orchestra’s sixth music director from 1953 until 1962) in 1957 by RCA; it was recently reissued as part of a comprehensive 63-CD set. The Banner was recorded a third time in 1986 for London Records, with Sir Georg Solti (our music director from 1969 until 1991) leading the Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Chorus, prepared by Margaret Hillis. (that same release included Bear Down, Chicago Bears and Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever). Stock’s orchestration—the one preferred by music director Riccardo Muti—is the version still used today.
__________
In the community, members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra also have performed The Star-Spangled Banner for Chicago sports teams. The brass section, led by associate conductor Kenneth Jean, helped open the Chicago Bears’s sixty-eighth season on September 14, 1987, performing the National Anthem at Soldier Field. And CSO violas—performing Max Raimi’s arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner—opened a Chicago White Sox game on August 25, 1998, at (new) Comiskey Park. On both occasions, the Chicago teams went on to victory: the Bears beat the New York Giants 34–19, and the Sox defeated the Baltimore Orioles, 6–4.
Kenneth Jean and members of the CSO brass at Soldier Field on September 14, 1987
CSO violas at Comiskey Park on August 25, 1998
__________
A slightly abbreviated version of this article appears in the September/October CSO program book.
Thanks to Mark Clague, Ph.D.—associate professor at the University of Michigan (and a former member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago)—for his guidance, and a tremendous amount of information can be found online at the Star Spangled Music Foundation’s website. Also thanks to CSO librarians Peter Conover, Carole Keller, and Mark Swanson, and Rosenthal Archives intern William Berthouex.
from the archives 