Léon Barzin
Léon Eugene Barzin (born November 27, 1900 in Brussels , † April 19, 1999 in Naples , Florida ) was an American conductor and violist of Belgian origin.
Life
Barzin came to America at the age of two, where his father played the first viola with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra . He received his first violin and viola lessons from him, later he was a student of Eugène Ysaÿe in Belgium. At the age of seventeen he performed as a violinist in the Hotel Astor in New York, in 1919 he became the youngest member of the National Symphony Orchestra , later he moved to the New York Philharmonic Orchestra , where he played the first viola from 1925 to 1929 under Arturo Toscanini , Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg played.
At the suggestion of Arturo Toscanini, he switched to the American Orchestral Society as a conductor in 1929 , which he reorganized and headed for forty-six years after being re-established under the name of the National Orchestra Association (NOA) in 1930. He was also the conductor of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra from 1938 to 1941 .
In the 1945/1946 season he worked for the first time with George Balanchine in the NOA's Adventure in Ballet program . With him and Lincoln Kirstein he founded the Ballet Society in 1946 , which became famous under the name The New York City Ballet and of which he was musical director until 1958. Since 1955 Barzin lived mostly in France. Here he worked as a conductor of the Orchester Pasdeloup and the Orchester Philharmonique de Paris and as a professor at the Schola Cantorum and has appeared as a guest conductor worldwide. From 1968 to 1970 he was a juror at the Dimitri Mitropoulos International Music Competition in New York.
In 1960 Barzin founded the Philharmonic Society and Les Muscoliers , a music group dedicated to the musical advancement of children, and in 1995 the Leon Barzin's Musica Vaux Association .
literature
- Barzin, Léon . In: John L. Holmes: Conductors on Record. Greenwood Press, Westport 1982, ISBN 0-575-02781-9 , p. 44.
- Barzin, Léon . In: Stefan Jaeger (Ed.): The Atlantis Book of Conductors. An encyclopedia . Atlantis, Zurich 1985, ISBN 3-254-00106-0 , p. 67.
Web links
- Leon Barzin in the Internet Movie Database (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Barzin, Léon |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Barzin, Léon Eugene (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American conductor and violist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 27, 1900 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brussels |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 19, 1999 |
| Place of death | Naples , Florida |