Dr. Erno Daniel, also a Hungarian refugee and faculty colleague of Balazs, became the orchestra’s next Musical Director/Conductor in 1952. The following year, the story of the WFSO, including selections from the November 2, 1953 concert, was broadcast in Europe from Stockholm, Sweden as part of Dr. Herbert Bloomstedt’s Symphonies in the United States series that aired on Swedish National Radio. The concert’s program included the music of Bach, Bartok, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky.
That same year the Wichita Falls Symphony Women’s League was formed. Along with helping sell annual subscription tickets and program advertising, the League also hosted a glamorous annual ball at the Wichita Falls Country Club from 1953 to 2002 to help raise awareness and funds for the WFSO. Changing its name to the Wichita Falls Symphony League in 1992, this volunteer group continues to support the orchestra through fundraising, hosting special events, providing meals to the musicians during rehearsals, offering scholarships to young area musicians, and acting as the WFSO’s official historians.
Dr. Daniel led three important world premieres while with the WFSO, the first of which was Ernst Von Dohnanyi’s Stabat Mater for Treble Chorus and Symphony in January 1956. Dohnanyi, one of the most renowned musical figures to come out of Hungary since Franz Liszt, was well regarded by the likes of Johannes Brahms, who organized the premiere of the younger composer’s 1895 Piano Quintet in C Minor. For the premiere of Dohnanyi’s Stabat Mater, the WFSO was accompanied by the Denton Boys’ Choir and the thirty-two-voice Modern Choir of Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University). Dr. Daniel had studied with Dohnanyi at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Budapest before the later moved to America in 1949 to escape the Second World War. Here, he became Composer in Residence at Florida State College.
The second world premier led by Dr. Daniel was that of American composer Alan Hovhaness’ Magnificat before an audience of 2,500 on January 26, 1959. The twelve-movement work was performed by a sixty-person orchestra, accompanied by four vocal soloists and seventy members of the Midwestern University Chorus. According to Hovhaness, the Magnificat was composed to “suggest the mystery, inspiration and mysticism of early Christianity.”
While Hovhaness was in Wichita Falls, the orchestra took the unique step of commissioning a work by him to memorialize the dedication and influence of local music patron Mrs. Delia Hawkins Staley of Burkburnett, Texas who had recently passed away. Though Dr. Daniel had already retired from his post as Musical Director/Conductor after the last concert of the 1959-1960 season to lead the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra, he was invited back to guest conduct Hovhaness’ new work, the Symphony No. 10, subtitled “Dawn,” in March 1961. Hovhaness, one of the 20th century’s most prolific composers, would go on to write fifty more symphonies throughout his lifetime. Along with the Dohnanyi and Hovhaness premiers under Dr. Daniel, Texomans were also treated to the talents of Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Rise Stevens, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and operatic soprano Nadine Conner.
