Leo Borchard News
German conductor (1899-1945)
Commemorations 2025 (Death: Leo Borchard)
- classical music
- Germany
- conductor, resistance fighter
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2024-04-21
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2021-08-27 22:53:00
NYTimes.com: When Europe Offered Black Composers an Ear: Spurned by institutions in America, artists were sometimes given more opportunities across the Atlantic.
[…] Pan-Africanists like George Padmore, Dunbar had long made plain his loathing of white supremacy, whether in the form of Nazism or British imperialism. In fact, he’d already performed Still’s “Afro-American Symphony” for its European debut a few years earlier, on a concert with the London Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall to raise funds for Black soldiers fighting the Nazis. Dunbar was invited to perform in Berlin by Leo Borchard, whom the victorious Allies had appointed the Philharmonic’s conductor, and was also an anti-Nazi dissident and resistance fighter who aided German Jews fleeing the Third Reich. The message of Dunbar’s debut could not be clearer: Classical music could not be divorced from a global fight against racism. *** The work of racial justice in the arts has always been a global effort. Europe’s role in this […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2016-06-23 02:10:00
Joachim’s 185th Celebrated at Goethe-Institut
[…] considered the Concerto in D minor (in the Hungarian Manner) “one of the most important documents of the middle of the 19th century.” Riggs directed our attention to the possible influences of this concerto on Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Vasiliki Papadopoulou also examined a Brahms connection with Joachim’s Violin Concerto in G minor, op. 3. Despite Joachim’s impeccable reputation as an artist, several aspects of his personal life are less attractive. Hamburg scholar Beatrix Borchard, who has published a joint biography of Joachim and his wife, the great singer Amalie Schneeweiss (Stimme und Geige [Voice and Violin]: Amalie und Joseph Joachim), documented that Joachim treated his wife with unjustified suspicion and disrespect, and ultimately divorced her. In her conference paper, Borchard discussed Amalie’s groundbreaking series of performances tracing the history of the German Lied, which she presented to great success in Europe, Russia, and the United States. Two lecture-recitals […]
2016-01-24 15:00:36
[…] 1939 Herbert von Karajan became Staatskapellmeister. From 1938 onwards, Einem also worked as an assistant of director Heinz Tietjen at the Bayreuth Festival. In 1941 he began to take counterpoint lessons with Boris Blacher; at that time he wrote his first work, Prinzessin Turandot, at the suggestion of Werner Egk. The ballet was first performed at the Dresden Semperoper conducted by Karl Elmendorff in early 1944 and became a success. Previously in March 1943, Leo Borchard had first performed Einem’s composition Capriccio (op. 2) with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. During World War II, in Berlin, Einem helped to both save the life and continue the professional development of young Jewish musician Konrad Latte by employing him as an rehearsal assistant for Prinzessin Turandot and later helping him obtain other employment. Einem obtained a ration book and membership card of the Reich Musicians’ Chamber for Latte, and lent him his own […]
Norman Lebrecht - Slipped disc
2015-05-22 11:27:10
Remembering the conductor that got shot
The Berlin Philharmonic, setting aside other distractions , is dedicating this weekend’s concerts to the memory of Leo Borchard, who conducted its first post-Hitler concert on May 26, 1945, standing in for Wilhelm Furtwängler who had fled to Switzerland. Borchard, 46 at the time, had been born in Moscow to German parents and lived in Berlin through the Nazi era, doing his best to help fugitives by furnishing them with false papers. On August 23, 1945, returning home from a concert, Borchard’s British army driver misread a ‘halt!’ sign from an American sentry, who shot the conductor dead. In September 1995, Claudio Abbado inaugurated a Berlin tradition of remembering the shot conductor. An exhibition on his life opens tomorrow at the Philharmonie, marking 70 years since his death.
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