Short excerpt from the interview appearing in the Koussevitzky Recordings Society newsletter

Anthony Morss was born in Boston and studied at Harvard and the New England Conservatory. While still a student he was chosen by Leopold Stokowski to be his Chorus Master and Associate Conductor with the Symphony of the Air. Morss has since guest conducted in Madrid, Barcelona, Marseilles and led the American premiere of Massenet's Marie Magdeleine with Regine Crespin. In 1990 he conducted the first original instrument performance of Beethoven's Fidelio in New York City. He was interviewed by Art Historian, author, and Koussevitzky Recordings Society Vice President Victor Koshkin-Youritzin. That interview was published in the Spring 1995 Koussevitzky Recordings Society Journal, and an excerpt appears below.

MORSS: Now that leads me to the time that I came to know Koussevitzky personally, when I was fourteen years old. I was visiting the family of one of his very favorite trustees of the Boston Symphony, John Nicholas Brown, whose son Nicky Brown was my roommate in school and later in college. Mr. Brown was off in World War II. Mrs. Brown, her son, and I, as a guest of the family, were invited by Koussevitzky to spend the weekend of August 4th and 5^th at his house near Tanglewood; "Serenak" it was called. And so I tagged along with saucer eyes and ears as big as Perot's. Naturally, I was just a kid, mostly listening as a whole lot of other people talked to Koussevitzky. But he was unfailingly gracious and kindly to me. I perceived he had the personality of a benevolent and magnanimous emperor. And he did pay attention to us young people. Indeed, he insisted that Nicky and I ride with him to one of the concerts. He chatted with us about things quite unrelated to music. I remember him telling us to be very careful, not to drive too fast when we got our licenses, because the time saved on the journey was not worth the danger. He said this with particular emphasis, which was characteristic of substantially everything he said.

Before we were introduced, my first impression of him came from his jackets hanging in the closet of the bedroom where Nicky and I were quartered. They were tiny, and I had the impression that Koussevitzky was a very tall man when he walked on stage, because he was so dignified and so perfectly proportioned. He was obviously a man of imperial command. He gave the impression of being very tall indeed, and when I saw those jackets, obviously they belonged to a very short man. I think he was something maybe between five-foot-six and five-foot-seven. Then when I met him I was in for another surprise. He used to rest before concerts, and he did not eat before an evening concert. He had been resting upstairs, and he came down to meet Mrs. Brown. I remember that he ran down the stairs. He was a man in his seventies, but he ran down the stairs like an absolute bolt of lightening and hugged her in enthusiastic Russian fashion, obviously so tremendously pleased to see her. All the way through that weekend I observed that he moved either very fast or very slowly, magisterially. There didn't seem to be anything in between.

Serenak was a rather rambling house with a beautiful lawn and view, very comfortable indeed. I recall that his conversation was concerned with music, but also everything else under the sun. I had not expected a great musician to be so enormously interested in politics, for example. I remember he spoke about the theater in New York extremely knowledgeably. I know that he was interested in literature, particularly in theater. Koussevitzky – and Charles O'Connell confirms my own experience in his book The Other Side of the Record – had foreseen in great detail the coming of World War II and even described very accurately the main battles that would be fought. As I remember Koussevitzky saying, he knew that our side would prevail, but he also knew that our temporary allies, the Russians, were going to be the major source of trouble in Europe after the victory was achieved. This is something that very few people would say and that few Americans knew. Of course, he knew the Russian regime very well. He knew how black-hearted they were and how expansionist, and he made no bones about the trouble that we were going to have. He was very prescient. He was really knowledgeable on that subject and people who knew him much better than I, and who spent hours conversing with him, were always astonished at how well-informed he was, at the breadth of this interests, whereas somebody like Toscanini was so exclusively focused on music that he was, I would say, considerably less culturally informed, although he was a very great conductor: I think that limitation shows up in Toscanini's interpretations. Koussevitzky's enormous breadth of cultural interests was very apparent in his enormous range of interpretive possibilities and his tremendous repertory, which was probably bigger than any other conductor's.

There was another thing that he said: the weekend before we arrived, there had been a concert in which one of the brass players had flubbed a passage so spectacularly, that it was spoken of by Koussevitzky when I was there. There was a notion running around later that if you made a mistake in performance, you got glared at all the next week in rehearsals. However, Koussevitzky's reaction to that was very interesting. The man was plainly a perfectionist. Not only did he set the highest possible standards, but he, Toscanini, and Stokowski between them undoubtedly created our current high orchestral standards. These three did more than any other conductors in world history to raise the standard of what was expected of orchestras, and Koussevitzky was unrelenting. Koussevitzky's reaction to this mistake that was apparently very noticeable to the audience was interesting to me. He said that accidents would happen occasionally, but he knew that his men were giving the very best they had in every single performance. One strived for perfection, but one could not always expect to get it.

He then went on to comment on the fact that although you might find an occasional player outside the Boston Symphony who was superior to the corresponding BSO musician, you would, in fact, not find an orchestra anywhere else that played together as well, both as an ensemble and in style. Now remember that this remark was made at a time when, by universal consent, the Boston Symphony had the highest percentage of individual virtuosos of any orchestra in the world.