SIR GEORG SOLTI, WORLD-RENOWNED CLASSICAL MAESTRO, DIES.

Byline: Allan Kozinn The New York Times

Sir Georg Solti, the vigorous and exacting Hungarian-born conductor who shaped the Chicago Symphony Orchestra into a gleaming virtuoso instrument during his 22 years as its music director and who won more Grammy Awards than any other performer, classical or pop, died Friday while visiting Antibes, in the south of France. He was 84 and lived in London.

In addition to his Chicago post, which he relinquished in 1991, Sir Georg was music director of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden for a decade starting in 1961, chief conductor of the Orchestre de Paris from 1970 to 1975, principal conductor of the London Philharmonic from 1979 to 1983 (he subsequently held the title conductor emeritus), and director of the Salzburg Easter Festival starting in 1992. He was made a Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1972 for his contributions to British music.

On the podium, Sir Georg was full of energy and color. Of medium height, trim and bald, he tended to sweep into a big Romantic symphony with angular, slashing gestures that could be taken either as pure showmanship or as a way of drawing on an orchestra's full reserve of energy.

On a few occasions he got so carried away during a performance that he injured himself with his baton. One of his biographers, William Barry Furlong, wrote in ``Season With Solti: A Year in the Life of the Chicago Symphony'' that at times the conductor ``looks like nothing so much as a spastic stork, bending and rearing convulsively, elbows pumping, knees popping, torso laboring until it seems almost as if he is going to tear the music from himself in a Dionysian frenzy.''

As a guest conductor, he worked with virtually all the world's major orchestras and opera companies. And starting in the 1970s, he occasionally took on a teaching project, including master classes at the Juilliard School, conducting workshops in Chicago and a workshop for young orchestral musicians from all over the United States at Carnegie Hall in 1994. He also began a concert series in London in 1995, in which he personally underwrote the costs of Wigmore Hall debut recitals for young musicians.

Sir Georg was the very model of a modern conductor. He knew that recordings were essential, and in the studio he was efficient enough to turn out hundreds of them and artful enough to keep a grip on listeners' attention, even in the most frequently recorded repertory. His landmark recording of Wagner's ``Ring des Nibelungen'' was not only the first integral studio recording of the cycle, but was also an audio spectacular that set the standard for the use of effects and spatial placement in stereo opera recordings.

Sir Georg made his U.S. debut conducting Strauss' ``Elektra'' at the San Francisco Opera in 1953. His Chicago Symphony debut followed the next year, and in 1956 he made his first appearance at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, conducting Wagner's ``Walkuere.'' In 1960 he made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Wagner's ``Tannhauser,'' and conducted there for four seasons before withdrawing after a dispute over casting.

In 1960, Sir Georg found himself juggling two offers. One was the directorship of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, where he had made his debut a year earlier. The other was the directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Sir Georg's first inclination was to take Los Angeles. But negotiations there began to unravel when the orchestra appointed Zubin Mehta co-director, apparently without consulting Sir Georg.

He took the Royal Opera instead, declaring that he would make it the finest opera house in the world. Although there was debate about whether he succeeded, even Sir Georg's critics conceded that he raised the standard of the company's orchestral playing considerably. He was, however, regarded as excessively autocratic and was nicknamed ``the Prussian of Covent Garden'' by the British press.

``It took awhile for the English to understand that I wasn't commanding people,'' Sir Georg explained, ``but rather encouraging them to seek improvement. Initially they found this very strange.''

During his decade at Covent Garden, Sir Georg gave the British premiere of Schoenberg's ``Moses und Aron'' (a work he later recorded) and the first Covent Garden productions of Strauss' ``Frau ohne Schatten,'' the Wagner ``Ring'' and Britten's ``Billy Budd'' and ``Midsummer Night's Dream.''

Sir Georg was also hitting his stride in the recording studio. He won his first Grammy Award in 1962 for an ``Aida'' with Leontyne Price, and 29 more Grammys followed, the most recent in 1992. At the time he was nearing the completion of his ``Ring'' cycle, with an extraordinary cast that included Birgit Nilsson, Kirsten Flagstad, Regine Crespin, Wolfgang Windgassen, Set Svanholm, James King, George London, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Hans Hotter. Working with producer John Culshaw, who wrote a book about the project, Sir Georg began the recordings in 1958 and completed them in 1965.

With the Chicago Symphony, Sir Georg recorded the core works of the Romantic canon: symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Mendelssohn and Berlioz, oratorios by Handel and Haydn, and tone poems and ballets by Debussy and Stravinsky. He conducted contemporary works, including Hans Werner Henze's ``Heliogabalus Imperator,'' Sir Michael Tippett's ``Byzantium'' and Fourth Symphony, Lutoslawski's Third Symphony, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Trombone Concerto and David Del Tredici's ``Final Alice'' (which he commissioned and recorded).

Still, his interest was largely in the classics. ``For me as a conductor, modern music stops around 1950, with late Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Bartok,'' he said in 1973. ``I don't go much farther. I leave it to the next generation to explore after 1950.''

Sir Georg is survived by his wife, Valerie, and two daughters, Gabrielle and Claudia.

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Photo

Photo: Sir Georg Solti

Winner of 30 Grammy Awards