Fiedler & Friends

Read About This Recording

Arthur Fiedler, one of the best-selling conductors in history and director of the Boston Pops for 50 years, summed up his uniquely programmed concerts this way: "I mix a little of the best of the old with a little of the best of the present and come up with a palatable concoction. I like to please people."

Fiedler, who began his career as a violinist with the Boston Symphony, had a long history of wanting to please people and, uneasy about his lack of European experience, he was eager to please himself by demonstrating his conducting skills in an America where European conductors ruled.

Recognizing that music in Europe was everywhere — in beer gardens, outdoor cafes in Austria and in the parks of France and Italy — Fiedler noticed that in the US symphony concerts were available only to people of means. He thought live music should be for everyone. So on July 4, 1929, he launched the famous long-lived Esplanade concerts in Boston — the first series of free outdoor concerts ever given by a symphony orchestra. The televised Bicentennial Esplanade concert in 1976 made the Guinness Book of World Records for drawing an audience of 400,000, the largest mass of people ever to attend a classical music performance.

In 1953 after years of radio broadcasts, the indomitable conductor formed the Boston Pops Tour Orchestra and the annual tours brought the Pops to towns and villages where no symphony orchestra had ever ventured before. And Fiedler's fame took a quantum leap when the Evening at Pops television series, begun in 1970, became the most highly rated program distributed by PBS.

Fiedler's palatable concoction formula didn't change over 50 years. His concerts always began with a march, followed by light classics, including some he feared were disappearing from the concert repertoire — Sousa marches, Strauss waltzes. Each year he gave an all-request concert and he always knew what the requests would be: "Bolero," "The Blue Danube," the "William Tell Overture," which he said "was good enough for Toscanini, and it's good enough for me." He also presented medleys from musical comedies, hit tunes, themes from popular TV shows and even an occasional TV commercial — all richly and lavishly orchestrated and ironically performed by an orchestra originally created for the aristocracy.

At Pops concerts, plenty of encores were the order of the day, and so were pranks by the sometimes disgruntled Pops orchestra, whose members once popped up umbrellas as fake snow fell on them as they performed "White Christmas." Fiedler, who said "Thank God I have a taste for everything," had a voracious appetite for new orchestral works and he premiered music by Khatchaturian and Shostakovich, as well as discovered and recorded such music as Jacob Gade's "Jalousie," RCA's first classical recording to sell one million copies. In 1964 he commissioned an arrangement of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," becoming the first to program The Beatles for a symphony concert.

Fiedler's condemnation of damned snobbism and his commitment to his audience remains a model for any musician, since the conductor called "Mr. Boston" brought the joy of classical music to millions of Americans, even though they were afraid of it. His records sold 50 million copies during his career, bearing out what Fiedler used to say gleefully about the punctual windups of his live concert encores: "leave 'em wanting more."

—Linda Kugler

Contents

The Carnival of Venice; Country Gentleman; Love Is Here to Stay; The Girl from Ipanema; Sophisticated Lady; Because; Scherzo from Concerto Symphonique No. 4 by Litolff; I Wonder As I Wander; I Got Rhythm; The Last Waltz; Satin Doll; Orange Blossom Special; Be My Love; Java; Embraceable You; A Song After Sundown; Ave Maria; Caravan.

The Boston Pops; Arthur Fiedler, Conductor; Plus, Guest artists: Stan Getz, Al Hirt, Leontyne Price, Kate Smith, Peter Nero, Duke Ellington, Louie Bellson, others.