A top conductor of large orchestral works of the late nineteenth century, Rafael Kubelik was born near Prague in 1914. The son of violinist Jan Kubelik (1880-1940), he studied violin, piano, composition, and conducting at the Prague Conservatory. He made his debut before the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra at age 19, and in 1939 became the music director of the National Opera in Brno, Czechoslovakia. In 1941, he became the music director of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, a post he held until 1948. In 1948, with the establishment of a Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, Kubelik left his homeland and became an exile for the next 40 years…
"…Still, the 1962 is not first rank for todays standards but is very good for the period. Recommended." ~sa-cd.net
"…Still, the 1962 is not first rank for todays standards but is very good for the period. Recommended." ~sa-cd.net
Kubelík’s star began to wane in the years before World War I. Some felt he had gone off the boil but it was more a question of his public turning to new idols, Elman and Vecsey. In 1915 he retired to take composition seriously, not resuming his concert career until 1920. He toured Britain 20 times from 1900 to 1934 (packing the Royal Albert Hall with 7,000 people in 1926) and the U.S. many times up to 1938 (6,000 heard him at the New York Hippodrome in 1920-21). He commanded a wide range of music and in Central Europe he is remembered as a great musician. He died in Prague on 5 December 1940. The main fruits of Kubelík’s five-year break were his first three Violin Concertos, published in Prague in 1920. Of the eventual series of six, Pavel Šporcl says: ‘They are technically very demanding and musically extremely interesting.’ The First Concerto in C major, which he plays here, is a melodious Late Romantic work, well tailored to a front-line virtuoso’s strengths, and it should not have fallen out of the repertoire. Kubelík emerged from his purdah to première it at the Grosse Musikvereinssaal in Vienna on 29 January 1917, Nedbal conducting the Tonkünstler Orchestra.
When Rafael Kubelik's 1977 recording of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis was finally released in 1994, the pantheon of great Missa Solemnis recordings had to make room for another member. Along with superb singing from the four soloists and the chorus, the superlative playing from the Bavarian Radio Symphony, and the supreme conducting from Kubelik himself, all the things that make the Missa Solemnis great the profundity, the spirituality, and the overwhelming sense that the numinous is imminent are present in Kubelik's interpretation.
"The set also includes two magnificent Kubelík recordings from the 1960s with Bavarian Radio forces. Schoenberg's Gurrelieder (with tenor Herbert Schachtschneider as a vocally heroic Waldemar) is superbly played and sung, and Kubelík's conducting is as dramatically involving as any. It sounds better than ever in this latest mastering. Finally, there is utter enchantment: the 1964 recording of Mendelssohn's music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (with Edith Mathis and Ursula Boese as soloists), prefaced by a fascinating rehearsal of the Overture, released here for the first time. The booklet includes excellent notes and photographs" ~International Record Review