Lorrin Koran's Music Treasury program, which is switching from its usual Tuesday slot to Thursdays at 8 p.m., has something interesting every week; broadcast on KZSU-FM 90.1, and available live online at www.kzsulive.stanford.edu.
For July 4, the subject is Fabien Sevitzky (1893-1967), Russian-born American conductor. He was the nephew of renowned double-bass virtuoso and longtime Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky. After first conducting the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1936, Sevitzky became its music director in 1937, a position he held through 1955.
He married harpist Mary Spaulding in 1959, and the couple subsequently moved to Miami to take up faculty positions at the University of Miami. He conducted the university orchestra, and became its permanent conductor in 1963.
He championed the music of William Grant Still, from whom he commissioned works including Threnody: In Memory of Jan Sibelius, and in 1960, he conducted the premiere of Still's opera Highway 1, U.S.A. He was music director of the Greater Miami Philharmonic Orchestra from 1956 to 1962.
Sevitzky conducts these recordings on the KZSU program: Enescu: Romanian Rhapsody No. 2 in D Major; Bloch: Concerto Grosso No. 1; Glazunov: From the Middle Ages Suite, Op. 79; Haydn: L’Isola Disabitata Overture; Dvorak: Slavonic Dance in F Major, Op. 46, No. 4; and Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 13 Winter Dreams.