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Léon Barzin
Léon Eugene Barzin (November 27, 1900April 29, 1999) was a Belgian-born American conductor and founder of the National Orchestral Association (NOA), the oldest surviving training orchestra in the United States. Barzin was also the founding musical director of the New York City Ballet. Life and career Born in Brussels, Belgium on November 27, 1900, Léon Barzin was taken to the United States at the age of two. He studied the violin with his father (principal viola at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels and later of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra), and later with Édouard Deru, Pierre Henrotte and Eugène Ysaÿe. He joined the New York Philharmonic in 1919 as a violinist and was appointed first viola in 1925, a position he retained until 1929, collaborating in those years with Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Arturo Toscanini. It was at Toscanini's encouragement that he began his conducting career. In 1930 he was named principal conductor and musical director of ...
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The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, the ''Times'' serves as one of the country's Newspaper of record, newspapers of record. , ''The New York Times'' had 9.13 million total and 8.83 million online subscribers, both by significant margins the List of newspapers in the United States, highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States; the total also included 296,330 print subscribers, making the ''Times'' the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States, following ''The Wall Street Journal'', also based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' is published by the New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, whose current chairman and the paper's publ ...
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Spoleto Festival
The ''Festival dei Due Mondi'' (Festival of the Two Worlds) is an annual summer music and opera festival held each June to early July in Spoleto, Italy, since its founding by composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958. It features a vast array of concerts, opera, dance, drama, visual arts and roundtable discussions on science. The "Two Worlds" in the name of the festival comes from Gian Carlo Menotti's intention to have the worlds of American and European culture facing each other in his event; this concept would then be strengthened by the fact that it was held in conjunction with its "twin", the Spoleto Festival USA held annually in May/June in Charleston, South Carolina. That twinning lasted some 15 years and, after growing disputes between the Menotti family and the board of Spoleto Festival USA, in the early 1990s a separation occurred. Under Menotti's direction in 1986, a third installment in the Spoleto Festival series was held in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne's Spoleto Festi ...
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Myra Hess
Dame Julia Myra Hess, (25 February 1890 – 25 November 1965) was an English pianist best known for her performances of the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. Career Early life Julia Myra Hess was born on 25 February 1890 to a Jewish family in South Hampstead, London. Her paternal grandfather had immigrated from Alsace. She was the youngest of four children and began piano lessons at the age of five. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and at the Royal Academy of Music under Tobias Matthay, after winning a scholarship to the latter in 1903 at age 12. Hess's debut came in 1907 when she played Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 with Thomas Beecham conducting. She went on to tour through Britain, the Netherlands and France, with the violinist Aldo Antonietti, with whom she had a love affair. In 1912 she performed with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Willem Mengelberg. During World War I large-scale musical activity ceased ...
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Felix Salmond
Felix Adrian Norman Salmond (19 November 188820 February 1952) was an English cellist and cello teacher who achieved success in the UK and the US. Early life and career Salmond was born to a family of professional musicians. His father Norman Salmond was a baritone, and his mother Adelaide Manzocchi was a pianist who had studied with Clara Schumann. At age twelve, Salmond started studying with the man who became his primary cello teacher, William Whitehouse. He won a scholarship to continue studies with Whitehouse four years later at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He continued on to the Brussels Conservatoire at age nineteen, where he studied for two years with Édouard Jacobs. His concert debut was in 1908, playing Frank Bridge's Fantasy Trio in C minor and Johannes Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor. Salmond's mother was the pianist, with Bridge on viola and Maurice Sons playing the violin. The recital, which took place at the Bechstein Hall, was very successfu ...
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Joseph Szigeti
Joseph Szigeti (, ; 5 September 189219 February 1973) was a Hungarian violinist. Born into a musical family, he spent his early childhood in a small town in Transylvania. He quickly proved himself to be a child prodigy on the violin, and moved to Budapest with his father to study with the renowned pedagogue Jenő Hubay. After completing his studies with Hubay in his early teens, Szigeti began his international concert career. His performances at that time were primarily limited to salon-style recitals and the more overtly virtuosic repertoire; however, after making the acquaintance of pianist Ferruccio Busoni, he began to develop a much more thoughtful and intellectual approach to music that eventually earned him the nickname "The Scholarly Virtuoso". Following a bout of tuberculosis that required a stay in a sanatorium in Switzerland, Szigeti settled in Geneva, where he became Professor of Violin at the local conservatory in 1917. It was in Geneva that he met his future wife, ...
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William Primrose
William Primrose (23 August 19041 May 1982) was a Scottish violist and teacher. He performed with the London String Quartet from 1930 to 1935. He then joined the NBC Symphony Orchestra where he formed the Primrose Quartet. He performed in various countries around the world as a soloist throughout his career. He also taught at several universities and institutions. He authored several books on viola technique. Biography Early years William Primrose was born in Glasgow, Scotland to John Primrose and Margaret McInnis (Whiteside) Primrose. He was the oldest of their three children. His father, John Primrose, taught violin and was part of the Scottish Orchestra. His father bought Primrose his first violin in 1908, when Primrose was only 4 years old. That same year, his father arranged violin lessons with Camillo Ritter, who had studied with Joseph Joachim and Otakar Ševčík. Primrose performed his first public concert on the violin in 1916, at the age of 12, playing Mendelsso ...
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Ernst Von Dohnányi
Ernst von Dohnányi (Hungarian: ''Dohnányi Ernő'', ; 27 July 1877 – 9 February 1960) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and conducting, conductor. He used the German form of his name on most published compositions. Biography Dohnányi was born in Pozsony, Kingdom of Hungary (today Bratislava, Slovakia). Born into the old noble Dohnányi family, he was the son of Frigyes Dohnányi (1843-1909) and his wife, Ottilia Szlabey. He first studied music with his father, a professor of mathematics and an amateur cellist, and then when he was eight years old, with Carl Forstner, organist at the local cathedral. In 1894 he moved to Budapest and enrolled in the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music, studying piano with István Thomán and composition with Hans von Koessler, a cousin of Max Reger. István Thomán had been a favorite student of Franz Liszt, while Hans von Koessler was a devotee of Johannes Brahms's music. These two influences played an impo ...
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Nathan Milstein
Nathan Mironovich Milstein ( – December 21, 1992) was a Russian and American virtuoso violinist. Widely regarded as one of the greatest violinists of all time, Milstein was known for his interpretations of Bach's solo violin works and for works from the Romantic period. He was also known for his long career: he performed at a high level into his mid-80s, retiring only after suffering a broken hand. Biography Milstein was born in Odessa, Russian Empire, the fourth child of seven, to a middle-class Jewish family with no musical background. Milstein’s mother recognized Nathan’s early interest in music and forced her young son to take violin lessons, hoping it would keep him out of trouble. In 1909, Milstein began to study with Odessa’s most prestigious violin teacher, Pyotr Stolyarsky, with whom he studied until the summer of 1914. (One of his fellow students was six-year old David Oistrakh.) When Milstein was 11, Leopold Auer invited him to become one of his students a ...
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Bronisław Huberman
Bronisław Huberman (19 December 1882 – 16 June 1947) was a Polish violinist. He was known for his individualistic interpretations and was praised for his tone color, expressiveness, and flexibility. The '' Gibson ex-Huberman Stradivarius'' violin, which bears his name, was stolen twice and recovered once during the period in which he owned the instrument. Huberman is also remembered for founding the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (then known as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra) and thus providing refuge from the Third Reich for nearly 1,000 European Jews. Biography Huberman was born in Częstochowa, Poland, to a Jewish family. In his youth he was a pupil of Mieczysław Michałowicz and Maurycy Rosen at the Warsaw Conservatory, and of Isidor Lotto in Paris. In 1892 he studied under Joseph Joachim in Berlin. Despite being only ten years old, he dazzled Joachim with performances of Louis Spohr, Henri Vieuxtemps, and the transcription of a Frédéric Chopin nocturne. ...
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Claudio Arrau
Claudio Arrau León (; February 6, 1903June 9, 1991) was a Chilean and American pianist known for his interpretations of a vast repertoire spanning the baroque music, baroque to 20th-century classical music, 20th-century composers, especially Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Chopin, Robert Schumann, Schumann, Franz Liszt, Liszt and Johannes Brahms, Brahms. He is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. Life Arrau was born in Chillán, Chile, to Carlos Arrau, an ophthalmologist who died when Claudio was only one year old, and Lucrecia León Bravo de Villalba, a piano teacher. He belonged to an old, prominent family of Southern Chile. His ancestor Lorenzo de Arrau was a Spanish people, Spanish engineer who was sent to Chile by King Charles III of Spain, Carlos III of Spain. Through his great-grandmother, María del Carmen Daroch del Solar, Arrau was a descendant of t ...
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Artur Schnabel
Artur Schnabel (17 April 1882 – 15 August 1951) was an Austrian-born classical pianist, composer and Pedagogy, pedagogue. Schnabel was known for his intellectual seriousness as a musician, avoiding pure technical bravura. Among the 20th century's most respected and important pianists, his playing displayed marked vitality, profundity and spirituality in the Austro-German classics, particularly the works of Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven and Franz Schubert, Schubert. Music critic Harold C. Schonberg described Schnabel as "the man who invented Beethoven". Between 1932 and 1935, he made history by producing Artur Schnabel's recordings of Beethoven's piano sonatas, the first recording of the complete Piano sonatas (Beethoven), Beethoven piano sonatas. In 2018, the Library of Congress selected this recording to be placed in the National Recording Registry for its historical significance. Life and work Early years Born Aaron Schnabel in Lipnik, Bielsko-Biała, Lipnik (Kunzen ...
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Emanuel Feuermann
Emanuel Feuermann (November 22, 1902 – May 25, 1942) was an internationally celebrated cellist in the first half of the 20th century. Life Feuermann was born in 1902 in Kolomyja, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Kolomyia, Ukraine) to Jewish parents. Both of his parents were amateur musicians. His father, who played the violin and cello, was his first teacher. His older brother Sigmund was also musically talented, and their little sister, Sophie (born January 1908) was the piano prodigy in the family. Their father decided to move the family to Vienna in 1907 for Sigmund to start his professional career there. At the age of nine, Emanuel received lessons from Friedrich Buxbaum, principal cello of the Vienna Philharmonic, and then studied with Anton Walter at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. In February 1914, the eleven-year-old prodigy made his concert debut, playing Joseph Haydn's Cello Concerto in D major with the Vienna Philharmonic under Felix Wei ...
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