Ernest Ansermet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ernest Alexandre Ansermet (Vevey, Switzerland, November 11, 1883 – Geneva, February 20, 1969) was a Swiss conductor.

1 Conducting career
2 Notable premieres
- 2.1 In concert
- 2.2 On record
3 External links

[edit] Conducting career

A contemporary of Wilhelm Furtwängler and Otto Klemperer – and, like them, skilled in 20th century music – Ansermet represents in most ways a very different tradition and approach from those two musicians. Originally he was a mathematics professor, teaching at the University of Lausanne. He began conducting at the Casino in Montreux in 1912, and from 1915 to 1923 was the conductor for the Diaghilev Ballet. Traveling in France for this, he met both Debussy and Ravel, and consulted them on the performance of their works. During World War I, he met Stravinsky, who was exiled in Switzerland, and from this meeting began the conductor's lifelong association with Russian music.

In 1918, Ansermet founded his own orchestra, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (OSR). He toured widely in Europe and America and became famous for accurate performances of difficult modern music, making first recordings of works such as Stravinsky's Capriccio with the composer as soloist. Also, Ansermet was one of the first in the classical music field to take jazz music seriously, and in 1919, he wrote an article praising Sidney Bechet.

After World War II, Ansermet and his orchestra rose to international prominence through a long-standing contract with Decca Records. Between then and his death, he recorded most of his repertoire, often two or three times. His interpretations were widely regarded as admirably clear and authoritative, though they were not without their detractors (they sometimes showed signs of rather crude wind playing, in particular), and they differed notably from those of other famous 20th-century specialists, notably Pierre Monteux and Stravinsky himself. Ansermet disapproved of Stravinsky's practice of revising his works, and always played the original versions. Although famous for performing much modern music by other composers such as Arthur Honegger and Frank Martin, he avoided altogether the music of Arnold Schoenberg and his associates, even writing a book, Les Fondaments de la Musique dans la Conscience Humaine (1961), in which he sought to prove (partly through drawing upon his own mathematical studies) that Schoenberg's idiom was false and irrational.

During his old age he and his ensemble surprised many by issuing discs devoted to Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms. These performances were not at all conventionally Germanic, and were much criticized at the time of their appearance, but during recent years their vivacity has come to be appreciated more. In 1958, with his orchestra, Ansermet recorded the first stereo LP record album of the complete Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky, for Decca (issued on London Records in the U.S.), and there are those who regard his recording as the finest ever made of the work. Ansermet was also one of the very first conductors to make stereo recordings of Claude Debussy's Nocturnes and the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.

Ansermet was an ardent man who argued his opinions vehemently. He was notable in Britain for his argumentative rehearsals with British orchestras, who were used to the more jovial style of Sir Thomas Beecham and the more restrained manner of Sir Adrian Boult. His last recording, typically of Stravinsky's Firebird, was made in London with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, and a recording of the rehearsals and sessions was made as a memorial to him.

Ansermet composed some pieces for the piano and orchestra, among them a symphonic poem entitled Feuilles de Printemps (Leaves of Spring).