The paper analyses the programmes of Dimitri Mitropoulos with the New York Philharmonic, based on the orchestra’s archive, which had recently been made available on the Internet. Its starting point is the choice of works as the conductor’s tool for realising his artistic vision: in Mitropoulos’s case, the programmes served the aim of winning as wide an audience as possible for music, especially for music that had not yet become the property of the many. Before the data on Mitropoulos himself, the paper outlines the orchestra’s activity from 1928 to 2009: the impact of the economic crisis of the 1930s, the rapid increase in concerts in the years 1941–1944, and the roughly 195 concerts per season from the early 1960s onwards, that is, on average less than a day between two concerts. The tables do not come directly from the archive but from processing of its data.
Presentation. The paper was presented at the conference “Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896–1960): fifty years later”, at the Athens Concert Hall (12–13 November 2010). The full text was published in the conference proceedings (2011).