Jonel Perlea’s mother was of German extraction and his father of Romanian. He studied composition with Beer-Walbrunn and piano with Kotana in Munich between 1918 and 1920, followed by a period in Leipzig as a pupil of Paul Graener, Otto Lohse and Martinsen. Having made his conducting debut in Bucharest in 1919, he was engaged as chorusmaster at the Leipzig Opera for the 1922–1923 season, followed by two seasons in the same position at Rostock (1923–1925). After military service in Romania during 1926, he returned to the opera house as a conductor at Cluj for the 1927–1928 season before joining the Bucharest Opera as first conductor from 1928 to 1932 and then as chief conductor from 1934 to 1944. During this period he conducted the first performances in Romania of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Verdi’s Falstaff and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Perlea also held two other significant appointments, as chief conductor of the Radio Bucharest Symphony Orchestra, from 1936 to 1944, and as professor of conducting at the Bucharest Conservatory, from 1941 to 1944.

While seeking to travel to France in 1944 Perlea and his wife were interned by the Nazi authorities in Vienna, and spent a year in concentration camps. Released in 1945 they travelled to Italy, where Perlea worked as permanent conductor at the Rome Opera from 1945 to 1947 and also conducted the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome and at La Scala, Milan, making his debut there leading Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. He travelled to the USA in 1949 and first appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in that year, once again with Tristan und Isolde. The critics praised the beauty and clarity of the orchestral sonority that he achieved as well as the urgency of his interpretation (which has been preserved on record). During the 1949–1950 season he conducted equally successful performances of Verdi’s La traviata and Rigoletto and Bizet’s Carmen, but despite these successes he was not to remain long at the Metropolitan: the new manager from1950 onwards, Rudolf Bing, offered him only Die Fledermaus for the 1950–1951 season.

During 1950 Perlea appeared with the San Francisco Opera and with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, as well as at La Scala, and during 1951 with the San Antonio Opera in Texas. The following year he returned to Romania to conduct the Bucharest Philharmonic Orchestra and began a long period as a teacher of conducting at the Manhattan School of Music in New York; he also became conductor of the Connecticut Symphony Orchestra in 1955, remaining with it until his death in 1970. He conducted a famous account of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, with Magda Olivero, Ettore Bastianini and Boris Christoff at the Maggio Musicale, Florence, in 1954, and the first performances of Nino Rota’s opera Il capello di paglia di Firenze (The Florentine Straw Hat) in Palermo, in 1955. Although Perlea suffered a heart attack in 1957 and a stroke during the following year which paralysed his right arm, he nonetheless learnt to conduct using only his left arm and continued his musical career: making for instance a strong impression with his direction of Puccini’s Tosca for the American National Opera Company, run by Sarah Caldwell, in 1967, when he also returned once more to conduct the Bucharest Philharmonic; and also with his recordings for RCA, such as Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia with Montserrat Caballe in the title role. His repertoire was held to be extremely large, covering eighty operas and over six hundred symphonic pieces.

Perlea recorded for three companies: RCA, Vox, and the less well-known American label, Remington. Given that Remington’s recording director, Laszlo Halasz, with whom Perlea worked closely, was notorious for insisting upon the minimum time necessary to produce a finished recording, it is a tribute to Perlea’s skill as a conductor that he was able to create, for Remington as well as for RCA and Vox, stylish and idiomatic performances of a wide-ranging repertoire with a variety of orchestras.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).