Roman Totenberg
Roman Totenberg ( born January 1, 1911 in Łódź, Russian Empire, † 8 May 2012 in Newton ( Massachusetts)) was an American violinist and violin teacher of Polish-Jewish origin.
Life
At the age of 5 years, his parents Slanislava ( Vinaver ) and Adam Totenberg moved to Moscow, where his father had found work as a civil engineer. He received his first violin lessons from a neighbor who also happened to be concert master of the Bolshoi Opera. For his performance he was paid with bread and butter. As a novel of 10 years to Warsaw returned, he was already one years later his debut with the Warsaw National Philharmonic and was a child prodigy on the violin. With Karol Szymanowski, whom he met at the Warsaw Academy of Music, he toured in the late 1920s through Europe. In 1928 he became a pupil of Carl Flesch in Berlin and received in 1931 a third of the ausgelobten Felix Mendelssohn -Bartholdy Scholarship. He pulled in front of the German National Socialists in 1932 to Paris, where he studied with George Enescu and Pierre Monteux.
Following his U.S. debut with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington 1935 Totenberg was invited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House and three years later he emigrated to the United States.
Totenberg toured with Arthur Rubinstein through South America. He gave numerous concerts with the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas and all Brandenburg Concertos. Its wide-ranging repertoire included more than 30 concerts. Among the many contemporary works, which he presented, are the Darius Milhaud Violin Concerto No. 2, William Schuman Concerto, and to call the Krzysztof Penderecki Capriccio. He has also Paul Hindemith Sonata in E premiered (1935 ), the Samuel Barber Concerto ( new version ) and the Bohuslav Martinů Sonata.
In his career as a violinist he has with the major symphony orchestras in America like New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Washington Symphonies and in Europe with the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw Amsterdam played. Among the conductors were Stokowski, Kubelik, Szell, Rodzinski, Fitelberg, Jochum, Rowicki, Krenz, Monteux, Wit, Steinberg and Golschmann.
In 1943 he was a founding member of the " Alma Trio" with pianist Adolph Baller and cellist Gabor Rejtő under the auspices of Yehudi Menuhin. 1953 ended Totenberg his collaboration with the Alma Trio. His successor was Maurice Wilk.
He was also active as a music teacher at various music academies and summer courses in Aspen and Tanglewood in the USA and became a professor at Boston University, whose string section he headed from 1961 to 1978. He then taught in the older age at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge (Massachusetts), and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore.
Totenberg received the award Honored Polish culture and in 2000 the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 1988. He died on 8 May 2012 at his home in Newton, Mass..