Abravanel, Maurice

▪ 1994

      U.S. conductor (b. Jan. 6, 1903, Thessaloniki, Greece—d. Sept. 22, 1993, Salt Lake City, Utah), was of Spanish-Portuguese Sephardic parentage and had his early career in the cultural ferment of Weimar Germany, but he later spent more than three decades as music director and conductor of the Utah Symphony Orchestra. Abravanel grew up in Lausanne, Switz., and gave up the prospect of medicine to study music. In 1922 he went to Berlin, where he studied performance and composition with Kurt Weill, and two years later he made his debut as a conductor. He conducted throughout Europe and in 1933 fled to Paris and was engaged as music director for George Balanchine's Les Ballets 1933. In 1936 he went to the U.S., where he became the youngest conductor in the history of the Metropolitan Opera. Abravanel then conducted musicals on Broadway, including works of Weill. In 1947 he became director of the Utah Symphony, and he remained there until 1979. Under his leadership the orchestra flourished and gained widespread recognition; among their many recordings was the first complete cycle of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler made by a U.S. orchestra. In 1982 Abravanel began an affiliation with the Berkshire Music Center, in Tanglewood, Mass. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1991.

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