First Utah Symphony rehearsal with Maurice Abravanel

I was searching for some information on the internet and came across this 1990 article from the Deseret News on the Utah Symphony. In it, I found an interesting story about the Utah Symphony’s first rehearsal with conductor Maurice Abravanel.

 “At our first rehearsal,” he recalls, “they could not get through the first movement of the `Eroica.’ On that same program I also had Richard Strauss’ `Don Juan,’ because Strauss himself had told me it was not important that every note be played correctly. Later the concertmaster, Leonard Posner, came to me and said, `The entire section asks you to take “Don Juan” off the program. They simply cannot play it.’ So I explained that the only way to grow was not simply to play the pieces they knew but to learn the pieces they played. Well, at the concert itself they did justice to everything.”

If you’d like to read the entire article, it’s available on archive.deseretnews.com. There are a lot more fun stories in the article.