Ethel Stark
Ethel Stark, CM, GOQ ( born August 25, 1916 in Montreal, † 16 February 2012) was a Canadian conductor, violinist and music teacher.
Life
Stark had violin lessons with Alfred De Sève and then studied with Saul Brant at McGill University. From 1928 to 1934 she studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia violin with Lea Luboshutz, chamber music with Louis Bailly and Artur Rodzinski and conducting with Fritz Reiner. In addition, they also had violin lessons with Carl Flesch.
In 1934, she played with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra under Fritz Reiner in the U.S., a radio recording of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in. She stepped et al with the Montreal Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the CBC Montreal Orchestra and Les Concerts symphoniques de Montréal on. For the CBC in 1946, she played the world premiere of Violet Archer's dedicated to her Sonata for Violin and Piano Forte and Hugh Poynter Bells Sonata with John Newmark on the piano.
Stark 1938 was founding director of the New York Women's Chamber Orchestra. In 1940, she founded the first all-female symphony orchestra in Canada, the Montreal Women's Symphony Orchestra, which she ran until the end of the 1960s. Finally she founded in 1954, the Ethel Stark Symphonietta and in the same year, the Montreal Women's Symphony strings, which existed until 1968.
As a guest conductor Stark worked among others with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1946 ) and the Quebec Symphony Orchestra (1950), the Miami Symphony Orchestra ( late 1950s and early 1960s ) in the United States as well as with radio orchestras in Israel and Japan. Overall, they looked at more than three hundred radio productions with a violinist or conductor.
Stark taught in 1951 at the Catholic University of Washington, then to 1963 at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal and 1974-1975 at Concordia University.
In 1976 she was awarded a prize by the Concert Society of the Jewish People's Schools and Peretz Schools as an outstanding Canadian artist. In 1979 she became a member of the Order of Canada and 2003 Great Officer of the Ordre national du Québec.
On February 16, 2012 Ethel Stark died at the age of 95 years.