- Married to French-born soprano Lily Pons.
- He commissioned Aaron Copland to compose the famous "Lincoln Portrait".
- He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 6542 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.
- Developed the lush 'Kostelanitz sound', which was popularly used in Hollywood scoring during the 1940's and 50's.
- Conducted many famous orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic.
- Became a naturalised U.S. citizen in 1928.
- Trained at St. Petersburg conservatory (1920-22), but left Russia towards the end of the civil war. Began his musical career in the U.S. as a rehearsal pianist with the Metropolitan Opera. By 1930, he was employed as a conductor for CBS radio.
- After the December 31, 1979 concert with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Kostelanetz left for a vacation in Haiti. While in Haiti, Kostelanetz contracted pneumonia and died on January 13, 1980, aged 78.
- When he was 19, the Grand Petrograd Opera Company held a competition to select a chorusmaster and assistant conductor, in which he was selected despite being the youngest applicant.
- In the 1930s, he began his own weekly show on CBS, Andre Kostelanetz Presents.
- William Walton dedicated his Capriccio burlesco to Kostelanetz, who conducted the first performance and made the first recording, both with the New York Philharmonic.
- He continued until after some of his contemporaries, including Mantovani, had stopped recording.
- Outside the United States, one of his best known works was an orchestral arrangement of the tune "With a Song in my Heart", which was the signature tune of a long-running BBC radio program, at first called Forces Favourites, then Family Favourites, and finally Two Way Family Favourites.
- His last concert was A Night in Old Vienna with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at that city's War Memorial Opera House on December 31, 1979.
- Four of Kostelanetz's albums made the Billboard Hot 200, no match for his Columbia easy listening rivals Ray Conniff and Percy Faith but typical of many of popular instrumental easy listening artists of the day whose audience did not buy their albums immediately upon release but bought them over the years.
- Kostelanetz actually started making this music before there was a genre called "easy listening".
- He began playing the piano at four and a half years old.
- He made numerous recordings over the course of his career, which had sales of over 50 million.
- He commissioned many works, including Jerome Kern's Portrait of Mark Twain, William Schuman's New England Triptych, Paul Creston's Frontiers, Ferde Grofé's Hudson River Suite, Virgil Thomson's musical portraits of Fiorello La Guardia and Dorothy Thompson, Alan Hovhaness's Floating World, and Ezra Laderman's Magic Prison.
- He was a cousin of physicist Lew Kowarski.
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