Robert Shaw (conductor)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Robert Shaw | ||
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| Background information | ||
| Birth name | Robert Shaw | |
| Born | April 30, 1916 Red Bluff, California, United States |
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| Died | January 25, 1999 (age 82) New Haven, Connecticut, USA |
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| Genre(s) | Classical | |
| Occupation(s) | Composer, conductor, Arranger, Choral | |
| Label(s) | Telarc, Deutsche Grammophon, RCA Victor | |
| Associated acts |
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Cleveland Orchestra |
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Robert Shaw (April 30, 1916 – January 25, 1999) was an American conductor most famous for his work with his namesake Chorale, with the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Shaw received 14 Grammy awards, four ASCAP awards for service to contemporary music, the first Guggenheim Fellowship ever awarded to a conductor, the Alice M. Ditson Conductor's Award for Service to American Music; the George Peabody Medal for outstanding contributions to music in America, the Gold Baton Award of the American Symphony Orchestra League for "distinguished service to music and the arts, the American National Medal of Arts, France's Officier des Arts et des Lettres, England's Gramophone Award, and was a 1991 recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.[1] [2]
[edit] Biography
Shaw was born in Red Bluff, California. In 1941 he founded the Collegiate Chorale, a group notable in its day for its racial integration. The group performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the NBC Symphony and Arturo Toscanini, who famously remarked, "In Robert Shaw I have at last found the maestro I have been looking for." [3] Shaw continued to prepare choirs for Toscanini until March 1954, when they sang in Te Deum by Verdi and the prologue to Mefistofele by Boito. Shaw's choirs participated in the NBC broadcast performances of three Verdi operas: Aida, Falstaff and A Masked Ball. They can be seen on the home videos of the telecasts of Aida and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (from April 1948). Shaw himself took a bow at the end of the Beethoven telecast.
He went on to found the Robert Shaw Chorale in 1949, a group which produced numerous recordings on RCA Records up until his appointment in Atlanta. The Chorale visited 30 countries in tours sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Shaw was named music director of the San Diego Symphony in 1953 and served in that post for four years. Only after his San Diego tenure did he become an apprentice again, studying the art of conducting with George Szell and serving as his assistant at the Cleveland Orchestra for eleven seasons. He also took over the fledgling Cleveland Orchestra Chorus and fine-tuned it into one of the finest all-volunteer choral ensembles sponsored by an American symphony orchestra. From 1967-1988 he was music director and conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.[4] In 1970 he founded the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus and worked to recreate the success he had had for Cleveland in preparing them for performances and recordings with their namesake symphony orchestra.
After stepping down from his Atlanta post in 1988, Shaw continued to conduct the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as its Music Director Emeritus and Conductor Laureate, was a regular guest conductor with other orchestras including Cleveland, and taught in a series of summer festivals and week-long Carnegie Hall workshops for choral conductors and singers.
During his long career, Shaw drew attention to choral music and came to be considered the "dean" of American choral conductors, mentoring a number of younger conductors, including Jameson Marvin, Margaret Hillis, Maurice Casey, Ken Clinton, Donald Neuen, and Ann Howard Jones, and inspiring thousands of singers he worked with around the United States. He achieved such spectacular results that he raised choral standards in the United States to new heights, and many of his recordings are considered as benchmarks for choral singing.[[1]] His Christmas albums were bestsellers. Although his formative years and much of his work occurred prior to the rise of mainstream interest in informed historic performance practice, his insistence on textual clarity and that the words being sung must be the foundation of musical interpretation ensured that his renditions remain remarkably effective and fresh even when compared against today's recordings (which often use smaller numbers of singers). He recorded many of the great choral-orchestral works more than once, and his performances of Handel's Messiah, Bach's Mass in B Minor, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, and other similar masterworks remain world famous and highly regarded. For Telarc Records, in addition to his work with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, he made several recordings with the Robert Shaw Chamber Singers (using mainly personnel from the Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus), and with the Robert Shaw Festival Singers, a group assembled for Shaw's summer choral workshops in France.
His last recording was a highly-acclaimed Telarc recording of Dvorak's deeply-moving Stabat Mater with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, chorus, and soloists.
Shaw died in New Haven, Connecticut, of a stroke.
[edit] References
- ^ Telarc website, Robert Shaw, http://www.telarc.com/biography/bios.asp?aid=97
- ^ Singers.com website, Robert Shaw, http://www.singers.com/choral/robertshaw.html
- ^ Joseph A. Mussulman (1979). Dear People...Robert Shaw, Hinshaw Music, Inc. ISBN 0-937276-18-9
- ^ Nick Jones (1999), The Legacy of Robert Shaw, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra website, http://www.atlantasymphony.org/abouttheaso/legacyofrobertshaw.aspx
5. Robert K. Dean, The Foreign Tours of the Robert Shaw Chorale. Dissertation Abstracts. 2000
[edit] External links
- Atlanta Symphony Orchestra website
- Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus website
- Robert Shaw Discography website
- Robert Shaw Resource website
| Preceded by Henry Sopkin |
Music Directors, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra 1967–1988 |
Succeeded by Yoel Levi |
