Lorin Maazel
Lorin Maazel was an American conductor, violinist, and composer. He was born into an American Jewish family in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, and grew up in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His family was deeply involved in music: his mother founded the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra, while his grandfather Isaac Maazel was concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra for two decades.
Maazel studied music privately in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh and began studying conducting at an early age, including with Vladimir Bakaleinikov. At nine he conducted at the New York World's Fair, and at eleven he won Arturo Toscanini's approval after appearing with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. He made his Pittsburgh debut as a violinist in 1945 and played first violin in the Pittsburgh Fine Arts Quartet. Alongside music, he studied mathematics, philosophy, and foreign languages.
In 1948 he joined the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra as a violinist and soon became assistant to its principal conductor. From 1953 he appeared as a conductor in Europe and toured internationally. In 1960 he made his London debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, receiving enthusiastic reviews for his Mahler performances, and became the first American conductor to take part in the Bayreuth Festival, conducting Lohengrin. He debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 1962 with Mozart's Don Giovanni and subsequently toured the Soviet Union and Japan. His European opera work included a 1965 Rome production of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin.
From 1965 to 1971 Maazel was artistic director of the German Opera in West Berlin, and he was principal conductor of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra until 1975. Although his operatic repertoire was chiefly classical, he also conducted contemporary works, including Dallapiccola's Ulysses. After leading London's New Philharmonia Orchestra during the 1971–1972 season, he became head of the Cleveland Orchestra, enlarging its repertoire and presenting several American premieres of new European compositions. He was principal conductor of the French National Orchestra from 1977 to 1982, and appeared at Covent Garden in 1978 with Verdi's Luisa Miller, which he recorded the following year.
Maazel conducted the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert in 1980–1986 and again in 1994, 1996, 1999, and 2005. In 1982 he became the first American appointed to lead the Vienna State Opera orchestra, serving for two years before returning to the United States as music consultant to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He later led the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1993 to 2002 and the New York Philharmonic from 2002. In 2004 he took charge of the Arturo Toscanini Youth Symphony Orchestra, which he led at the first International Festival of Symphony Orchestras in Moscow.
After leaving Pittsburgh in 1996, Maazel devoted increased attention to composition. Mstislav Rostropovich performed several of his cello works, and Jean-Pierre Rampal performed works for flute. Maazel also conducted the premieres of Krzysztof Penderecki's oratorio-symphony Seven Gates of Jerusalem in 1997 and Rodion Shchedrin's opera The Enchanted Wanderer in 2002. With his wife, Dietlinde Turban, he founded the summer Castleton Festival at their Castleton Farms estate in Virginia.
He made more than 350 recordings, including complete symphony cycles by Beethoven, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky, as well as many Puccini operas, Beethoven's Fidelio, both Ravel operas, and Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. His conducting was noted for expressiveness, philosophical depth, technical freedom, dynamic variety, formal clarity, and an exceptional memory that allowed him to conduct and rehearse without a score. He conducted the music for the opera films Don Giovanni, Carmen, and Otello.
Among Maazel's own works were the opera 1984, based on George Orwell's novel and first performed at Covent Garden in 2005, and Irish Vapors and Capers, a humorous work for orchestra, flute, and narrator written for James Galway. He also arranged Wagner's Ring cycle as a seventy-minute wordless symphonic suite, The Ring, which he recorded with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1987 and performed repeatedly thereafter. He died at Castleton Farms, Virginia, in 2014.