Solid!

Born

• August 15, 1909
• Wilkes-Barre, PA

Died

• September 17, 1973
• Greenwich, CT

Hugo Winterhalter

• BIOGRAPHY
• FILMOGRAPHY

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-1930s.

He both played with and arranged for several swing outfits up through the late 1940s, including Tommy Dorsey, Raymond Scott, Count Basie, Claude Thornhill, Will Bradley, 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 1950s. 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 1960s he worked on Broadway and in television, occasionally releasing an album before finally retiring. Hugo Winterhalter died in 1973.