DECEMBER 22

ANDRE KOSTELANETZ  FELIX SLATKIN

 1901 André Kostelanetz (Death: January 13, 1980) was a popular orchestral music conductor and arranger, one of the pioneers of easy listening music. Kostelanetz was known for arranging and recording light classical music pieces for mass audiences, as well as orchestral versions of songs and Broadway show tunes. He made numerous recordings over the course of his career, which had sales of over 50 million and became staples of beautiful music radio stations. For many years, Kostelanetz also conducted the New York Philharmonic in pops concerts and recordings, in which they were billed as Andre Kostelanetz and His Orchestra. André Kostelanetz may be best-known to modern audiences for a series of easy listening instrumental albums on Columbia Records from the 1940s until 1980. Kostelanetz actually started making this music before there was a genre called "easy listening". He continued until after some of his contemporaries, including Mantovani, had stopped recording.

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1915 Felix Slatkin (Death: February 8, 1963) was an American violinist and conductor. In 1935 he won a competition which included a solo appearance with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra and Jose Iturbi. Around this time he met cellist Eleanor Aller, also of Russian Jewish extraction, whom he later married. During the Second World War, he served his country as a musician at the Santa Ana Air Force Base and as a conductor of the Army Air Force Tactical Command Orchestra, an organization that raised over 100 million dollars in war bonds. He settled in Los Angeles and accepted the post of Concertmaster for Twentieth Century Fox Studios, performing numerous violin solos in motion pictures such as How Green Was My Valley and How to Marry a Millionaire. In 1939 he founded the highly-acclaimed Hollywood String Quartet, which produced over 21 albums for Capitol Records.

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