Pierre Monteux conducted the Berlin Philharmonic on only two occasions – in 1933 and again for this 1960 concert. The soloist in Saint-Saens' Third Violin Concerto was the Berlin Philharmonic's famous leader Michel Schwalbé and is a timely tribute to the violinist who died at the age of 92 on 9 October 2012.

The conductor and the soloist of the concerts at the beginning of October 1960 were not unknown to each other. In conversation the ninety-two-year-old Michel Schwalbé recalled how as a young man he had met Pierre Monteux for the first time in Paris. At the time the violinist was attending conducting classes led by Monteux who had a great influence on him.

Reviewing the present concert Werner Oehlmann wrote in Der Tagespiegel that Michel Schwalbé had achieved a ‘resounding success’ with the Violin Concerto in B minor by Saint-Saëns. He ‘played the extremely rewarding solo part pausing for hardly a couple of measures with captivating delicacy, with a dark, liquid tone on the G string and subtle detail in the figuration: a violinistic achievement of high rank legitimating the concertmaster as a soloist of taste and character’. Oehlmann’s colleague with Der Tag found that Schwalbé had mastered ‘the bewitching trickery of the passages with bravura’ and had given ‘the sweet, stylish cantilenas the noble elegance proper to them’.

For the conductor the main work was Stravinsky’s Petrushka ballet music. Heinz Joachim observed in Die Welt that five decades of most recent music history came to life when the eighty-five-year-old Pierre Monteux conducted this work. ‘For it was he, after all, who had conducted the memorable première of this work originally designed as a piano concerto and then composed as a ballet for Diaghilev… . Monteux bridged this period of time with a mental sprightliness and an élan that are simply remarkable… . The score – the colourful original version,... not the new version that Stravinsky later had to produce in order to protect himself against the violation of his own copyright […], sounded so fresh, so immediate to the senses and fascinating in its pictorial language, that even in this concert performance the optical experience was automatically renewed.’

Extracts from the booklet note.