This is a rare autographed program (playbill) from the Sunday evening, April 29th, 1947 concert presented by the SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA at Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, New York. The orchestra was conducted by PIERRE MONTEUX (who signed the front cover) with piano soloist LEONARD PENNARIO (who also signed the front cover). The concert included works by Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms, Camille Saint-Saens and Maurice Ravel.
Biographical Note: PIERRE BENJAMIN MONTEUX (April 4th, 1875 – July 1st, 1964) was a French (later American) conductor. After violin and viola studies, and a decade as an orchestral player and occasional conductor, he began to receive regular conducting engagements in 1907. He came to prominence when, for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company between 1911 and 1914, he conducted the world premieres of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and other prominent works including Petrushka, The Nightingale, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe and Debussy's Jeux. Thereafter he directed orchestras around the world for more than half a century. From 1917 to 1919 Monteux was the principal conductor of the French repertoire at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1919–24), Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra (1924–34), Orchestre Symphonique de Paris (1929–38) and the San Francisco Symphony (1936–52). 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. Although he was known for his performances of the French repertoire, his chief love was the music of German composers, above all Brahms. He disliked recording, finding it incompatible with spontaneity, but he nevertheless made a substantial number of records. Monteux was well known as a teacher. In 1932 he began a conducting class in Paris, which he developed into a summer school that was later moved to his summer home in Les Baux in the south of France. After moving permanently to the U.S. in 1942 and taking American citizenship, he founded a school for conductors and orchestral musicians in Hancock, Maine. Among his students in France and America who went on to international fame were Lorin Maazel, Igor Markevitch, Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, Andre Previn and David Zinman. The school in Hancock has continued since Monteux's death. (Wikipedia)Biographical note: LEONARD PENNARIO (July 9th, 1924 – June 27th, 2008) was an American classical pianist and composer. He was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in Los Angeles, remaining in L.A. for his entire career. He first came to notice when he performed Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto at age 12, with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The scheduled performer had fallen ill, and Pennario's piano playing had come to the attention of the conductor Eugene Goossens, who recommended him as the soloist after being assured by Pennario that he knew the work. In fact, he had never seen the music or even heard it, but he learned it in a week. He studied with Guy Maier, Olga Steeb, and Isabelle Vengerova and attended the University of Southern California, where he studied composition with Ernst Toch. World War II interrupted his career, and he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in the China Burma India Theater, where his piano skills were soon realized and served well entertaining troops of the Air Transport Command operation known as "The Hump". He occasionally had to play around keys missing from the keyboards of the pianos at a couple of the more remote bases. He was discharged in 1946 as a staff sergeant and was awarded three Battle Stars. He had, however, made his debut, in uniform, with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on November 17th, 1943, with Artur Rodzinski, playing Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1. Shortly after Sergei Rachmaninoff's death, the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos invited Leonard Pennario to be the soloist at a memorial concert, playing the Second Piano Concerto with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Pennario became the first pianist after the composer himself to record all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. His recording of the Rachmaninoff 2nd Concerto was used for the film September Affair (1950), in which Joan Fontaine plays a concert pianist preparing to play the concerto. Beginning in the 1960s, he played in a renowned trio with the violinist Jascha Heifetz and the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Miklos Rozsa wrote a piano concerto for Pennario, and he was the soloist in the first performance, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta. Pennario recorded over 60 LPs, most of them of composers dating from Chopin and later. He is perhaps best known for championing certain modern composers such as George Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, Rózsa, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Sergei Prokofiev. In 1958, he was tied with Walter Gieseking in terms of best-selling classical records involving the piano. Pennario retired from active performance and recording in the 1990s. He wrote some pieces of his own, such as Midnight on the Cliffs, March of the Lunatics, and a 4-hand arrangement of Chopin's Minute Waltz. He was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in October 2007. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease on June 27th, 2008 at the age of 83, in La Jolla, California.
DETAILS: The 32 page program measures 5 1/2" X 8 1/2" inches and includes the concert details, program notes, photos of both the conductor and the pianist in advertisements and promotional text. The front cover was signed by both artists and will be accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity.
CONDITION: With the exception of tape residue inside the back cover (also visible on the back cover) and minor edge wear, this rare program is in excellent condition and will make a wonderful addition to the collection of any classical music aficionado or historian. This item will be carefully packaged in a protective, carded sleeve and backed by stiff cardboard.