Artist

A master technician, a magician in sound—for some that was all there was to Ormandy—but for others, he was so much more. The highly renowned Hungarian American conductor and violinist was born Jenö Blau in Budapest in 1899. The musical prodigy tried a variety of musical jobs—violinist, concertmaster, professor—before settling on conducting after his arrival in the U.S. in 1921. His career really took off in 1936 when he took up the position of joint conductor alongside Leopold Stokowski at the latter’s already legendary Philadelphia Orchestra. Two years later, he became sole Music Director, a position he held for 42 years—and he continued to work with the orchestra almost up to his death in 1985. Few conductors have held a longer unbroken tenure with one orchestra, and as a result, Ormandy, a superb technician and trainer, built up his orchestra to the point where it was routinely compared with the internationally celebrated Berlin Philharmonic. Some critics and conductors questioned whether there was much more to Ormandy’s conducting than technical excellence and beautifully cultivated sound. But he had some striking admirers, notably the arch-Romantic Rachmaninoff and the arch-modernist Schoenberg. As well as excelling in late Romantic music, he was a tireless champion of contemporary music, both European and American.