The name Artur Rodzinski is less common today than the talent and creative heritage of this Polish conductor deserves. But from the 1930s until his death in 1958, this Polish conductor was respected not only by the audience, but also by musicians, including his colleagues on the stage.
“For those who grew to musical maturity with the concert life of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, his name may still have an aura,” Halina Rodzinski wrote in her memoirs, almost two decades after the death of her spouse, the Polish conductor Artur Rodzinski.
“For those who are younger,” she went on to lament, “my husband is a dry reference in a musical encyclopedia or a name on a record cover in the cut-rate rack of a discount store.”
That was in 1976. And the decades since have not been kind to Rodzinski, leaving him remembered, if at all, for embodying “all that a real maestro was supposed to be,” a critic once wrote: “preening, arbitrary, dictatorial, unpredictable, driven by ambition.”
We invite you to listen to some magnificent recordings of the great conductor’s performances.
