Mitropoulos

Takis Mitropoulos was resigned, but optimistic.

“There is a German verb, musizieren, which means to make music,” Thomson wrote in a review of one of Walter’s Philharmonic concerts in 1941, suggesting that the word applied more to him than to those, like Artur Rodzinski and Dimitri Mitropoulos, who had also conducted that orchestra.

In Minneapolis, he will head an orchestra whose past music directors include Eugene Ormandy, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Antal Dorati, Neville Marriner and Edo de Waart.

Cantelli didn’t read around a composer’s life, or consciously filter music through his own aesthetics; he just read scores, and without the memory of a Toscanini or a Mitropoulos he learned them, painstakingly, through their melodies.

In New York, where the ailing Toscanini was not told of his heir’s death, Mitropoulos led Strauss’s “Tod und Verklärung” in his memory with the Philharmonic, a performance that — unlike Cantelli’s own rapturous accounts — seems to dissolve in grief.