Pierre Benjamin Monteux (4 April 1875 – 1 July 1964) was a French conductor. He conducted the world premieres of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and other prominent works including Petrushka, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, and Debussy’s Jeux. In 1961, aged eighty-six, he accepted the chief conductorship of the London Symphony Orchestra. Monteux disliked recording, finding it incompatible with spontaneity, but he nevertheless made a substantial number of records.
About Pierre Monteux in brief
Pierre Benjamin Monteux (4 April 1875 – 1 July 1964) was a French conductor. He conducted the world premieres of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and other prominent works including Petrushka, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, and Debussy’s Jeux. He directed orchestras around the world for more than half a century. In 1961, aged eighty-six, he accepted the chief conductorship of the London Symphony Orchestra, a post which he held until his death three years later. Monteux disliked recording, finding it incompatible with spontaneity, but he nevertheless made a substantial number of records. His students in France and America who went on to international fame were Lorin Maazel, Igor Markevitch, Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn and David Zinman. He founded a school for conductors and orchestral musicians in Hancock, Maine. He was a member of the Geloso Quartet and the Fauré Second Piano Quartet. He died in 1964 at his home in Les Baux, in the south of France, after a long battle with cancer. He is buried at the Cimetière du Centre-Drouot in Paris, next to his wife, Clémence Rebecca née Brisac, who he married in 1893. He also had a son, Paul, who became an actor, and a son-in-law, Paul Monteux-Brisac, a conductor of light music. His wife was a graduate of the Conservatoire de Musique de Marseille and gave piano lessons.
His family was descended from Sephardic Jews who settled in the South of France. His ancestors included at least one rabbi, but Gustave Monteux and his family were not religious. He studied the violin with Jules Garcin and Henri Berthelier, composition with Charles Lenepveu, and harmony and theory with Albert Lavignac. While still a student, he played in the orchestra of the Folies Bergère; he later said to George Gershwin that his rhythmic sense was formed during the experience of playing popular dance music there. At the age of fifteen, while continuing his violin studies, Monteux took up the viola. He studied privately with Benjamin Godard, with whom he performed in the premiere of Saint-Saëns’s Septet, with the composer at the keyboard. In 1893, when he was eighteen, he was deputised with the Budapest Quartet for chamber music for Grieg, Grieg and Joseph Hollman. In his seventies, in his seventie years, he later played chamber music with the Grieg Quartet in Budapest. He later became a private violist in Vienna, playing Brahms’s Second Piano Second Quartet before the composer in Vienna. In 1932 he began a conducting class in Paris which he developed into a summer school that was later moved to his summer home inLes Baux in France.
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