Page "Pierre Monteux" Paragraph 69

Throughout his career Monteux suffered from being thought of as a specialist in French music.

The music that meant most to him was that of German composers, particularly Brahms, but this was often overlooked by concert promoters and recording companies.

Of the four Brahms symphonies, he was invited by the recording companies to record only one, the Second.

Recordings of his live performances of the First and Third have been released on CD, but the discography in Canarina's biography lists no recording, live or from the studio, of the Fourth.

The critic William Mann along with many others, regarded him as a " supremely authoritative " conductor of Brahms, Cardus disagreed: " In German music Monteux, naturally enough, missed harmonic weight and the right heavily lunged tempo.

His rhythm, for example, was a little too pointed for, say, Brahms or Schumann.

" Swain contends that no conductor knew more than Monteux about expressive possibilities in the strings, claiming that " the conductor who doesn't play a stringed instrument simply doesn't know how to get the different sounds ; and the bow has such importance in string playing that there are maybe 50 different ways of producing the same note ".