General Motors Concerts, offering classical music on the radio, were heard in different formats on the NBC Red and NBC Blue networks between 1929 and 1937. The concerts began 1929-31 as a 30-minute series on the Red Network with Frank Black as the musical conductor on Mondays at 9:30pm. It also aired as General Motors Family Party.
The 1935-37 Red series, expanding to a full hour on Sundays at 10pm, featured Ernö Rapée conducting, along with violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Erica Morini, tenor Lauritz Melchior, and sopranos Kirsten Flagstad, Lotte Lehmann and Florence Easton.
With a title change to The General Motors Promenade Concerts, the program moved April 1937 to the Blue Network for a series of hour-long thematic shows with male/female leads, including one show of Victor Herbert music with Jan Peerce and Rose Bampton. Broadcast on Sundays at 8pm, this series continued until June 1937.
As General Motors Concert, the final 13-week series brought together radio's first concert stock company on October 3, 1937. With Rapee conducting the General Motors Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, these broadcasts were part of a Sunday Nights at Carnegie Hall series sponsored by General Motors.
Swedish tenor Jussi Björling made his American debut as part of this series on November 28, 1937. The rotating line-up of leading name performers featured Björling, Donald Dickson, Helen Jepson, Maria Jeritza, Grace Moore, Erna Sack, Joseph Schmidt and Richard Tauber. In addition to the music, John B. Kennedy narrated science stories. The announcer was Milton Cross. The series presented its final broadcast on December 26, 1937.
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—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)
“When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go. You heard of that market crash in ‘29? I predicted that.... I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said; nerves, I said. Then I asked myself, “What’s General Motors got to be nervous about?” “Overproduction,” I says. “Collapse.””
—John Michael Hayes (b. 1919)
“If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist on your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light.... Few things would mortify me more than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)