Franz Allers (August 6, 1905 - January 26, 1995) was a European-American conductor of ballet, opera, Broadway musicals, film scores, and symphony orchestras.
Franz Allers (August 6, 1905 - January 26, 1995) was a European-American conductor of ballet, opera, Broadway musicals, film scores, and symphony orchestras.
Franz Allers was born in Carlsbad, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic) in 1905. He started playing the violin at the age of 7. In 1920, he moved to Berlin, where he became a violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic. He had a distinguished career in Europe as an opera and symphonic conductor. [1]
In 1947, Allers conducted the original Broadway production of Brigadoon . He conducted the original 1951 Broadway production of Paint Your Wagon . [2] He was the music director for My Darlin' Aida the following year, and in 1954 he conducted the score for the animated film Hansel & Gretel. [3] Allers conducted the score to the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady in 1957, and would go on to win the Tony Award for Best Conductor and Musical Director.
Allers received a nomination at the 1960 Grammy Awards in the category of Best Recording for Children for the film soundtrack of Hansel & Gretel. [4] However, Allers lost out to Peter Ustinov's Peter & the Wolf (with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra).
In 1961, Allers conducted the original Broadway production of Camelot , which won him a second Tony Award for Best Conductor and Musical Director. On October 1, 1961, a German translation of My Fair Lady opened at the Theater des Westens in Berlin, conducted by Allers. [5] [6]
Allers moved to the United States in 1938. He met his first wife, singer Carolyn Shaffer, in Chicago in 1939. While working on Broadway, Allers, his wife and their daughter, Carol, lived in Riverdale, New York. In later life, he moved back to Germany and lived in Munich with his second wife, German actress/playwright Janne Furch-Allers (née Ertel). [7] She died in 1992 at the age of 76. [8]
In 1995, Allers died from complications from pneumonia at the Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada while traveling to California. He was 89. [9]
According to his New York Times obituary, "Allers, along with the conductor Maurice Abravanel, 'completely revised the standards of Broadway pit work,' demanding the highest quality from both the orchestra players and the singers." [9]
Alan Jay Lerner was an American lyricist and librettist. In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, and later Burton Lane, he created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre both for the stage and on film. Lerner won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors.
My Fair Lady is a musical with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The story, based on the 1938 film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician, so that she may pass as a lady. Despite his cynical nature and difficulty understanding women, Higgins grows attached to her.
Frederick Loewe was an American composer. He collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on a series of Broadway musicals, including Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot, all of which were made into films, as well as the original film musical Gigi (1958), which was first transferred to the stage in 1973.
Maury Yeston is an American composer, lyricist and music theorist.
Marvin Frederick Hamlisch was an American composer and conductor. He is one of few people to win Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards, a feat dubbed the "EGOT". He and composer Richard Rodgers are the only people to have won those prizes and a Pulitzer Prize ("PEGOT").
Lerner and Loewe refers to the partnership between lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe. Spanning three decades and nine musicals from 1942 to 1960 and again from 1970 to 1972, the pair are known for being behind the creation of critical on stage successes such as My Fair Lady, Brigadoon, and Camelot along with the musical film Gigi.
Alfred Newman was an American composer, arranger, and conductor of film music. From his start as a music prodigy, he came to be regarded as a respected figure in the history of film music. He won nine Academy Awards and was nominated 45 times, contributing to the extended Newman family being the most Academy Award-nominated family, with a collective 92 nominations in various music categories.
Thomas Z. Shepard is an American record producer who is best known for his recordings of Broadway musicals, including the works of Stephen Sondheim. Shepard is also a composer, conductor, music arranger and pianist.
John Francis Mauceri is an American conductor, producer, educator and writer. Since making his professional conducting debut almost half a century ago, he has appeared with most of the world's great orchestras, guest-conducted at the premiere opera houses, produced and musically supervised Tony and Olivier Award-winning Broadway musicals, and served as university faculty and administrator. Through his varied career, he has taken the lead in the preservation and performance of many genres of music and supervised and conducted important premieres by composers as diverse as Debussy, Stockhausen, Korngold, Hindemith, Bernstein, Sibelius, Ives, Elfman and Shore. He is also a leading performer of music banned by the Third Reich and especially music of Hollywood's émigré composers.
Bartlett B. Sher is an American theatre director. The New York Times has described him as "one of the most original and exciting directors, not only in the American theater but also in the international world of opera". Sher has been nominated for nine Tony Awards, winning a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for the 2008 Broadway revival of South Pacific.
Alexander Cesare Gemignani is a Broadway actor, tenor, musician, and conductor.
Paul Gemignani is an American musical director with a career on Broadway and West End theatre spanning over forty years.
Alex Lacamoire is a Cuban-American composer, arranger, conductor, musical director, music copyist, and orchestrator who has worked on many shows both on and off-Broadway. He is the recipient of multiple Tony and Grammy Awards for his work on shows such as In the Heights (2008), Hamilton (2016), and Dear Evan Hansen (2017). Lacamoire was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2018.
Ted Sperling is a musical director, conductor, orchestrator, arranger, stage director and musician, primarily for the stage and concerts. He won the Tony Award for Best Orchestrations and the Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations, for his work in The Light in the Piazza in 2005. He is the Artistic Director of MasterVoices, formerly the Collegiate Chorale.
Peter Matz was an American musician, composer, arranger and conductor. His musical career in film, theater, television and studio recording spanned fifty years, and he worked with a number of prominent artists, including Marlene Dietrich, Noël Coward and Barbra Streisand. Matz won three Emmys and a Grammy Award and is best known for his work on Streisand's early albums as well as for his work as the orchestral conductor and musical director for The Carol Burnett Show.
The Theater des Westens is one of the most famous theatres for musicals and operettas in Berlin, Germany, located at Kantstraße 10–12 in Charlottenburg. It was founded in 1895 for plays. The present house was opened in 1896 and dedicated to opera and operetta. Enrico Caruso made his debut in Berlin here, and the Ballets Russes appeared with Anna Pavlova. In the 1930s it was run as the Volkstheater Berlin. After World War II it served as the temporary opera house of Berlin, the Städtische Oper. In 1961 it became the first theatre in Germany to show musicals. Since then it has become the "German equivalent of Broadway extravaganzas", putting on plays and musical comedies.
Salvatore Dell'Isola was a conductor who acted as music director for several of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals on Broadway, among others. He won a Tony Award as music director of Flower Drum Song.
Rob Fisher is an American music director, conductor, arranger and pianist. He was the founding music director and conductor of the New York City Center Encores! series from 1994 to 2005. He is the leader of the Coffee Club Orchestra, which was the house band for Garrison Keillor’s radio broadcasts from 1989 to 1993.
Charles Jaffe was an American conductor and musical director, after starting out as a violinist with the Curtis String Quartet in Philadelphia. As musical director of West Side Story, he was nominated for a Tony Award in 1964.
Jordan Donica is an American actor and singer. He is known for his theatrical roles in musicals.
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