Antonia Brico’s Mozart LP
- Antonia Brico’s Mozart LP is still available on a Sony CD. She had lived at the Bella Vita Towers, a nursing home in History Colorado, formerly the Colorado Historical Society, holds a large collection of her personal papers. The effect is subtle and beautifully conceived. Antonia Brico was a unique figure in classical music. During her student years, she supported herself by playing piano recitals and became interested in conducting while working as an assistant to Paul Steindorff, the director of the San Francisco Opera.In 1927, she went to Berlin to study conducting at the Berlin State Academy of Music. She also directed the Denver Opera Association, the Women’s String Orchestra and the Boulder Philharmonic and was active as a teacher.
In 1938, she became the first woman to stand on the podium and conduct the New York Philharmonic. In 1938, she became the first woman to stand on the podium and conduct the New York Philharmonic. Cut to her playing the next few measures on stage, in concert. Antonia Brico dreams of becoming a conductor, but she isn’t taken seriously because she is a woman.
Antonia Brico’s articulate recollections always link music to love, and this documentary, inspired by her former student Judy Collins and put together by Jill Godmilow, communicates from start to finish Antonia’s enormous capacity for both music and love. They went into trances and said that Music fills the film everywhere: Rachmaninoff, Schumann, Bach, even ”After You’ve Gone” and “Whispering.” Appropriately, it’s all Antonia’s (except for Schweitzer’s Bach), whether from old records in her livingroom or the new Brico Orchestra’s concert. Born Antonia Louisa Brico to a Dutch Catholic unmarried mother in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Brico was renamed Wilhelmina Wolthuis by her foster parents.She and her foster parents migrated to the United States in 1908 and settled in California.On leaving Oakland Technical High School in Oakland in 1919 she was already an accomplished pianist and had experience in conducting.
Her last New York appearances were in 1977, when she performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonia.TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
This article was most recently revised and updated by In 1926 she moved to Hamburg, Germany, where the legendary Karl Muck, former conductor of the Boston Symphony, led the Hamburg Philharmonic. Little is known about her birth parents, Johannes and Antonia (Shaaken) Brico, who died when she was two.