Condition:
André Kostelanetz Conducts The Music Of Alan Hovaness The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam - Narrated By Douglas Fairbanks, jr. World Premiere
1977
Columbia
USA
Record: VG ++ a couple light scuff marks
Cover: Mint
Tracklisting:
Side 1
The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam
Sunrise
Meditation On Orpheus
Side 2
And God Created Great Whales
Fantasy On Japanese Woodprints
Floating World
André Kostelanetz (Russian: Андрей Костеланец, December 22, 1901, St. Petersburg, Russia - January 13, 1980) was a popular orchestral music conductor and arranger, one of the pioneers of easy listening music.
Biography
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Kostelanetz escaped from the Bolshevik-Communist state in 1922 after the Russian Revolution.[citation needed] He arrived in the United States that year, and in the 1920s, conducted concerts for radio. In the 1930s, he began his own weekly show on CBS, André Kostelanetz Presents.
Kostelanetz was known for arranging and recording light classical music pieces for mass audiences, as well as orchestral versions of songs and Broadway show tunes. He made numerous recordings over the course of his career, which had sales of over 50 million and became staples of Beautiful Music radio stations.[citation needed] For many years, Kostelanetz also conducted the New York Philharmonic in pops concerts and recordings, in which they were billed as "Andre Kostelanetz and His Orchestra".
Kostelanetz is best known to modern audiences for a series of easy listening instrumental albums on Columbia Records from the 1940s until 1980. Kostelanetz actually started making this music before there was a genre called "easy listening"[citation needed], and he continued until after some of his contemporaries, including Mantovani, had stopped recording.
Outside America, one of his best known works was an orchestral arrangement of the tune "With a Song in my Heart", which was the signature tune of a long-running BBC radio program, at first called Forces Favourites, then Family Favourites, and finally Two Way Family Favourites.
Toward the end of his recording career, his name was more of a brand than a true representation of who actually made the music, because nearly all of his output in the 1970s was arranged by others.[citation needed] Some of the arrangers credited on 1970s Kostelanetz albums include Teo Macero, Torrie Zito, Hank Levy, Luther Henderson, Jack Cortner, Eddie Sauter, Claus Ogerman, Jack Pleis, Tommy Newsom, Harold Wheeler, Bobby Scott, Homer Dennison, James Tyler, Jr., Byron Olson, Dale Oehler, Ben Lanzarone, LaMont Johnson, Wade Marcus, Patrick Williams, Sammy Nestico, Warren Vincent, Dick Hyman, Jorge Calandrelli, James J. Wisner, Al Capps and Don Sebesky.
Kostelanetz's last concert was "A Night in Old Vienna" concert with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in the War Memorial Opera House on December 31, 1979.[citation needed]
He died in Haiti on 13 January 1980.
He was the second husband of the soprano Lily Pons.
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