Not JSB...Beethoven. I was fortunate to be able to attend the 200th birthday performance of his Missa Solemnis outdoors at the Carmel Mission in 1970. I wondered if there was any online record of that performance, and found this bit buried within a borked optical scan of an October, 1970 issue of a Tuscon, AZ newspaper.
Beethoven Music Festival Slated in Calif. City CARMEL, Calif. – In celebration of Ludwig van Beethoven’s bicentennial birthday, an outdoor festival of his music will be presented Oct. 17 at the historic Mission Basilica here. Seating is limited to 3,500 for the one-hour-forty-minute presentation of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Opus 123, conducted-by Haymo Täuber, conductor and director of the Monterey County Symphony Orchestra. The concert will feature the 70-piece Monterey Symphony Orchestra and the 90-member Monterey Peninsula Choral Society, augmented by the Sacramento Chorale. Part of the Old Monterey 200th birthday celebration this year, the festival focuses attention on Carmel Mission Basilica, the beautiful stone church erected between 1793 and 1797 at the direction of Father Junipero Sena.
The conductor's wife was one of my German professors at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. She got me EXCELLENT seats! The four soloists were fantastic. Täuber rebuilt the Vienna Boys Choir after WW II, and then built a boys choir for Iran, for which he was awarded their highest civilian honor. The guy was brilliant!