Manuel Rosenthal - Conducting Career

Conducting Career

His conducting career began fully in 1934, when he became a percussionist and assistant conductor of the Orchestre National de France, to Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht. In 1936 he was invited by Georges Mandel to become the conductor of the Orchestre de Radio PTT. As his fame as a conductor grew, he was atttacked in L'Action Française in 1937 by Lucien Rebatet who demanded his expulsion from his post. In the same year Serge Koussevitzky, in Paris during the Exposition invited Rosenthal to go to Boston to become his assistant – an offer reiterated after a Salle Pleyel concert on the eve of war in 1939. After the death of Ravel, and following the success of Gaîté Parisienne, Rosenthal became a close colleague of Stravinsky.

Rosenthal's musical career was interrupted by World War II when, after joining his regiment as a Corporal in the 300th infantry regiment, he was stationed near the Rhine in Alsace in 1939, and became a prisoner of war in May 1940. During his time in the prisoner of war camp he organised concerts, creating an operetta based on a play by Georges Courteline. Included in an exchange of prisoners sent back to the occupied zone, Rosenthal arrived back in Paris in March 1941, but escaped to Marseille in the Zone libre with the help of Roland-Manuel. He was arrested in Besançon in September 1941 while attempting to see his son, and was sentenced to six months forced labour. With the assistance of a German officer he got the necessary papers to escape back to Marseille. Later in 1942 he returned to Paris and worked in the Resistance with Désormière, Durey, Delvincourt and others.

Upon the liberation in 1944, he returned to the Orchestre National de France to become their principal conductor, a post he held until 1947. The first concert consisted of works from each of the Allied countries, including the Hymne à la Justice by Magnard, and he ensured a wide range of contemporary music was played; the first season included a complete cycle of the works of Stravinsky. In his final year with the orchestra he brought them to join Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic in a concert organised by Jack Hylton that filled the Harringay Arena with 13,500 listeners.

In early 1946 Rosenthal went to the USA to conduct concerts with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. Having accepted the post of composer-in-residence at the College of Puget Sound, he was invited to become music director of the Seattle Symphony from 1948–1951; he also undertook guest engagements in San Francisco and in Buenos Aires. He was engaged to inspect the orchestra in Algiers, and conducted there and in Tunis during the winter of 1952-53.

He was music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Liège from 1964-1967. Rosenthal also served as professor of conducting at the Paris Conservatoire from 1962 to 1974, instituting a more demanding schedule for his students, who included Yan Pascal Tortelier, Eliahu Inbal, Jacques Mercier, Marc Soustrot and Jean-Claude Casadesus. He conducted some of the first modern performances of Rameau’s Zoroastre, at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux and the Opéra-Comique in 1964. The BBC in Manchester invited him to conduct an opera of his choice in 1972; he took on Chabrier's Le roi malgre lui with a French cast, which helped promote Chabrier's music in the UK.

In February 1981 Rosenthal made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera New York in a mixed-bill of 20th century French stage works, returning in 1983 for Dialogues des carmélites, and further appearances in 1986 and 1987. He returned to Seattle in 1986 to conduct the Ring cycle for Seattle Opera.

He conducted the first performance of Pelléas et Mélisande in Russia in Moscow in 1988, and later that year gave the premiere of the same work in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1992 he conducted a production of Padmâvatî at the Opera Bastille.