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Hugo Winterhalter
Big
band arranger and lounge music orchestra leader Hugo Winterhalter was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in August
1909. He attended Mt. St. Mary's College and the New England
Conservatory of Music, where he studied violin and reed instruments,
and taught school for several years after graduation before becoming
a professional musician in the mid-thirties.
He both played with and arranged for several swing outfits up through
the late forties, including Tommy Dorsey, Raymond Scott, Count Basie,
Claude Thornhill,
Nye Mayhew and Larry Clinton, and did vocal arrangements for Dinah Shore and Billy Eckstine. In 1948, he was named musical director
at MGM, leaving after only two years for a short stint as musical
director at Columbia before taking
the same job at RCA, where he remained until 1963.
He first began recording albums under his own name in the early
fifties. His work combined both his big band influence and his love
of lush, light classical music, falling handily in the genre of easy
listening, or ''lounge'' music. He charted a number of singles
between 1950 and 1956, and his popular albums included the famous Hugo
Winterhalter Goes . . . series,
featuring Latin, Hawaiian, Gypsy, and other ethnic rhythms.
In 1963, he left RCA for Kapp Records,
where he spent two years. During the later part of the sixties, he
worked on Broadway and in television, occasionally releasing an album
before finally retiring. Hugo Winterhalter
died in 1973.
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Born
August 15,
1909
Wilkes-Barre, PA
Died
September
17, 1973
Greenwich, CT
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