Reisenberg and Mozart

Synopsis

During her lifetime, pianist Nadia Reisenberg was regarded as one of this country’s finest concert artists. She performed at Carnegie Hall 22 times, often with the New York Philharmonic.

But she made history on today’s date in 1939 as she embarked on a series of concert performances encompassing of all 27 of the Mozart Piano Concertos. These were live radio broadcasts conducted by Alfred Wallenstein, originating at WOR in New York, relayed coast-to-coast via the Mutual Network and the CBC in Canada, and overseas via short wave. There were 29 broadcasts in all, one a week, starting on September 12, 1939 and ending on March 26, 1940.

Mozart’s 27 piano concerts were first published in 1850, almost 60 years after the composer’s death, but before Reisenberg’s broadcasts, no one had performed all of them in such a series. French composer and pianist Camille Saint-Saens played nine Mozart concertos in Paris in 1864/1865, and 11 during a series in London in 1910, but Reisenberg was the first to perform all 27 in one concert sequence, since even Mozart never played them all in just one season.

Amazingly, live aircheck recordings of most of these historic radio broadcasts have survived and are now part of the Nadia Reisenberg Collection in the International Piano Archives at Maryland.

Music Played in Today's Program

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Piano Concerto No. 26 (Coronation); Nadia Reisenberg; WOR studio orchestra; Alfred Wallenstein, conductor; (recorded March 19, 1940); IPA of Maryland Reisenberg Mozart Piano Concertos CD 13

On This Day

Births

• 1825 - Austrian flautist and conductor Karl Doppler, in Lwow

• 1901 - German composer Ernst Pepping, in Duisburg

• 1906 - Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich, in St. Petersburg (Gregorian date: Sept. 25);

• 1939 - American composer Phillip Ramey, in Chicago

Deaths

• 1764 - French composer Jean Philippe Rameau, 80, in Paris

Premieres

• 1910 - Mahler: Symphony No. 8 (Symphony of a Thousand) in Munich, with the composer conducting

• 1932 - Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Brasilieras No. 1, in Rio de Janerio

• 1937 - Milhaud: Suite Provençale in Venice, conducted by the composer

• 1954 - Bernstein: Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) at Teatro La Fenice in Venice, with composer conducting and Isaac Stern the violin soloist

• 1967 - Kokonen: Symphony No. 3, in Helsinki

• 1969 - Henri Lazarof: Cello Concerto, in Oslo, Norway

Others

• 1840 - Marriage of Robert Schumann, 30, to Clara Wieck, on the day before her 21st birthday.