Artur Rodzinski: Shostakovich’s Champion in the West

The extreme exigencies of the Second World- War made for strange bedfellows, with the counter poles of American capitalism and Soviet communism paradoxically aligned to defeat a common enemy: Nazi Germany. Ideological differences were temporarily set aside and Russian music, and in particular that of Dmitri Shostakovich, enjoyed a tremendous vogue in American concert halls. Indeed, it became positively fashionable to program Shostakovich, with the likes of Koussevitzky, Stokowski, and Toscanini vying for first performance rights to his latest score. Yet for nearly a decade prior to the outbreak of war in Europe, Shostakovich already enjoyed steadfast advocacy from a young dynamic conductor born in Split (formerly Yugoslavia / present day Croatia) on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. His name was Artur Rodzinski and he would remain Shostakovich’s most ardent champion outside the Soviet Union, conducting his music with a missionary zeal, with an incisive brilliance, and with a discernment and conviction that no conductor of his time, either in Europe or the United States, would ever quite match.