Gifts and Acquisitions

the library have been able to ascertain, the suite is otherwise unknown.

The composer left Germany to settle in the United States in 1938,
where he came without undue hardship. It was then that he changed his
name from Marcus (his German father's surname) to Dahl (his Swedish
mother's maiden name), by which he achieved renown as a composer,
conductor, and teacher. He was appointed to the faculty of the School
of Music of the University of Southern California in 1945, a position he
held at the time of his death in 1970. He had won a Guggenheim Fellow-
ship in 1952 and had taught at Tanglewood between 1952 and 1955,
where some of his major works were played.

Walter Gieseking (1895—1956) was born in France of German parent-
age. His concert career as pianist began after his service in the World
War 1. Although he was primarily known as a virtuoso, he occasionally
composed. In 1922 he wrote his suite for four recorders and piano, and
Mme. Weiss-Mann, who served as the official pianist for the wind group
in Hamburg, participated in the first performance, after which the holo-
graph was presented to her. Gieseking made his American debut at
Aeolian Hall in New York in 1926 and concertized widely in this coun—
try. An artist with an all-encompassing technique as well as an uncanny
ability to interpret many styles with equal mastery, he was held in high
esteem. For example, Professor Mann recalls that the Hamburg critic,
Siegfried Scheffler, once wrote, “God Save the Gieseking.” Toward the
latter part of his life, however, he was the center of some controversy.
When he arrived in 1949 for a concert tour in the United States, he was
severely criticized for his cultural cooperation with the Nazi regime. It
was only after he was cleared by the Allied Court that he resumed his
concertizing in America, where he returned to give his Carnegie Hall
concert on April 22, 1953. The present composition is apparently not
published and is otherwise unknown.

In October 1982, The Morning Musicale established a fund for the
purchase of music in memory of the late Helen Ankner Kondolf and to
pay tribute to her many contributions to the cultural life of Rochester
and vicinity. Mrs. Kondolf began her long career of some 50 years in the
1920’s as pianist for Radio Station WHAM and as organist at the Palace
Theatre. Her service to music included innumerable performances as
soloist, accompanist, and member of chamber ensembles, and all of her
appearances were marked with the high quality of technical mastery
and musicianship for which she was justly famous. Because of her inter-
est in music written for two pianos, the members of The Morning
Musicale suggested that the Sibley Library obtain works in that genre,
to be made available for performance by its clientele. Moreover, it was
also thought that some compositions useful for scholarly research might