Via the invaluable site Composers Doing Normal Shit, here are remarkable home movies taken by the conductor Artur Rodzinski in the early and mid-nineteen thirties. They have been uploaded to YouTube by his grandson, the film composer Xander Rodzinski. The parade of celebrities includes Clemens Krauss, Richard Strauss, Vladimir Horowitz, Leopold Stokowski, George Gershwin, William Andrews Clark, Jr. (founder of the LA Phil), Maurice Ravel, Serge Koussevitzky, Arthur Lourié, Franz Schreker, and Karol Szymanowski (seen at home in Zakopane). Olin Downes, the longtime chief music critic of the New York Times, appears in a number of the videos; he traveled widely in Europe in the summer of 1932, reporting and broadcasting, and, in an unusual arrangement, Rodzinski evidently served as his documentarian. For those with Times access, here is Downes's report of his visit to Szymanowski.
