Dimitri Mitropoulos - Massenet: Scènes alsaciennes - Suite No. 7 (Remastered) (1949/2022)

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) was a Greek conductor who came to America in the 1930s and made many recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Like Wilhelm Furtwangler of Arturo Toscanini, Mitropoulos' height of popularity came just before the advent of modern sound technology, so that many of Mitropoulos' finest recordings are marred by distortion and background noises that may make those recordings practically un-listenable to some classical music enthusiasts (although the new Sony Mitropoulos set has advertised that most of those very rough recordings have been "remastered").

As with Toscanini, Mitropoulos was said to have had a photographic memory that was so incredible that he rehearsed and conducted without a score. As with Furtwangler, Mitropoulos had an approach to music that was very free and organic, at least to my ears. Mitropoulos also had a very eclectic choice of repertoire. Like Bruno Walter, Mitropoulos was a champion of Mahler long before Leonard Bernstein made it fashionable. Mitropoulos also championed the likes of many composers who were his contemporaries such as Schoenberg, Berg, Krenek, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Sam Barber, and Gunther Schuller. Mitropoulos was also a very fine pianist who recorded a handful of concertos by the likes of Bach, Prokofiev, and Krenek as both pianist and conductor long before Leonard Bernstein did it.

During the early 1980s and into the 1990s, and prior to the rise of the internet and online shopping; a Dimitri Mitropoulos record or CD was somewhat hard to come by in your local music store. Unlike the the recordings of Bruno Walter, George Szell, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Arturo Toscanini, Charles Munch and others; Mitropoulos' recordings were for some reason not often featured as part of the numerous RCA or Columbia budget lines of reissues.