Léon Barzin

Léon Eugene Barzin ( born November 27, 1900 in Brussels, † 19 April 1999 in Naples, Florida ) was an American conductor and violist of Belgian origin.

Life

Barzin came at the age of two years to America, where his father was the first viola played at the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He received from him the first violin and viola lessons, and later he was a pupil of Eugène Ysaÿe in Belgium. At the age of seventeen he joined as a violinist at the Hotel Astor in New York, in 1919 he became the youngest member of the National Symphony Orchestra, later he joined the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, where he, from 1925 to 1929, the first viola under Arturo Toscanini Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg played.

At the suggestion of Arturo Toscanini, he joined in 1929 as a conductor for the American Orchestral Society, which he reorganized and after the re-establishment under the name National Orchestra Association ( NOA ) 1930 forty-six years long headed. In addition, he was from 1938 to 1941 conductor of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra.

In the 1945/1946 season he worked in the program in Ballet Adventure of the NOA for the first time together with George Balanchine. With this and Lincoln Kirstein in 1946, he founded the Ballet Society, which became famous under the name The New York City Ballet and their musical director, he was until 1958. Since 1955, Barzin lived primarily in France. Here he worked as a conductor of the Orchestre Pasdeloup and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Paris and a professor at the Schola Cantorum and entered the world as a guest conductor.

In 1960, Barzin founded the Philharmonic Society and Les Muscoliers, a group of musicians, the musical development of children dedicated to, and in 1995 the Leon Barzin 's Musica Vaux Association.