Stokowski interviewed by Deryck Cooke (1965)

[@tedatwork2343]

Love the way you've illustrated their conversation with photos of the people and places discussed. Dunno if you have an upload of that Mahler premier, but if you do you ought to link it in this video's description.

[@Gorboduc]

Stokowski's premier of Mahler 8 was in February of 1916, so there are a few photos but alas no recording.

[@antoniboleslawowicz8095]

Stokowski was wrong about one thing: “I don’t have much mind.” He had a very agile mind which served him very well over many years. But he is right that people generally do not listen much and talk too much -- truer today than even in 1965. His affinity for Mahler, too. He did, luckily, make a superb recording (with the LSO) of Mahler No. 2 toward the end of his life. He has some great insight into Carl Nielsen, too. Stokowski is a truly “representative man” (in the Emersonian sense) of the first half of the twentieth century. In my views, that was perhaps the most colorful and unusually diverse period of creative music-making. Stokowski may not have been a composer, but he understood creative musicians.

[@paullewis2413]

For obvious reasons we no longer have people who had direct links with the great 19th/early 20th c. composers. Leopold Stokowski was one of the last of those and I feel privileged that as a very young man I saw him in London in the late 60`s, I think it was the Philharmonia orchestra but can`t be sure. Interesting he should have been an admirer of Nielsen at a time when he was seldom heard, one of my favourite symphonic composers!