Henri Temianka

The quartet drew its name from the fact that all four of its instruments, made by Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737), had once been owned by the Italian virtuoso violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840).

The other original members were Gustave Rosseels, second violin, and Robert Courte, viola.

Subsequent members included Charles Libove, Stefan Krayk and Harris Goldman, violin; Charles Foidart, David Schwartz and Albert Gillis, viola; and Adolphe Frezin and Lucien Laporte, cello.

The quartet made its world debut at the University of California at Berkeley.

Henri Temianka (19 November 1906 – 7 November 1992) was a virtuoso violinist, conductor, author and music educator.

Henri Temianka was born in Greenock, Scotland, to parents who were Polish emigrants.

He studied violin with Carel Blitz in Rotterdam from 1915 to 1923, with Willy Hess at the National Conservatory in Berlin from 1923 to 1924, and with Jules Boucherit in Paris from 1924 to 1926.

He then enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied violin with Carl Flesch, who reported of him in 1927, "Was brought over by me. First class technical talent, somewhat sleepy personality, has still to awake."

In 1928, Flesch said, "His violinistic personality is for the moment still above his human one. Life shall be his best teacher in this regard."

Later he stated, "...he has made an intensive study of my method of teaching, of which I consider him the best exponent in England."

In his memoirs he said, "...there was above all Henry [sic] Temianka, who did great credit to the Institute: both musically and technically, he possessed a model collection of talents."

Temianka's playing was further influenced by Eugène Ysaÿe, Jacques Thibaud and Bronisław Huberman.

After a brilliant New York City debut in 1928, described by Olin Downes in The New York Times as "one of the finest accomplishments in years," Temianka returned to Europe and rapidly established himself as one of the era's foremost concert violinists.

He made extensive concert tours through almost every country in Europe and appeared with major orchestras both in Europe and the U.S. under conductors including Pierre Monteux (who gave him his first Paris appearance), Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Adrian Boult, Fritz Reiner, Sir Henry J. Wood, George Szell, Otto Klemperer, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and William Steinberg.

In Leningrad he was engaged for a single performance, but his virtuosity was so impressive that he was retained for five performances with five complete programs within a week.

He also studied conducting with Artur Rodziński at Curtis, and became its first graduate in 1930.

In 1935 he won third prize in the first Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Warsaw, Poland; Ginette Neveu took first prize, and David Oistrakh second.

(A short documentary about that historic event can be found at http://www.wieniawski.com/1ivc.html.) In that year he also premiered a suite that the then-unknown Benjamin Britten had written for him and pianist Betty Humby, and performed music by Sergei Prokofiev, with the composer at the piano in Moscow; and Ralph Vaughan Williams conducted his violin concerto for him in London.

Temianka recalled that a concert he had given in Madrid in 1935 had been attended by a powerful Spanish aristocrat and president of the Bilbao Philharmonic Society, Ignacio de Gortazar y Manso de Velasco, the 19th Count of Superunda.

The Count personally escorted Temianka's parents from jail to his mansion, and then arranged for their passage by ship to Cuba and the United States, where they became citizens.

Temianka described these remarkable events in a chapter of his second book Chance Encounters (unpublished); that chapter has been integrated with illustrations of many of the relevant photographs, letters and other documents, and privately printed as a monograph.

In 1936 he founded the Temianka Chamber Orchestra in London.

He was the concertmaster of the Scottish Orchestra from 1937 to 1938.

He gave his first concert in Los Angeles, a violin recital, at the Wilshire Ebell in 1940.

From 1941 to 1942 he was the concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony under Fritz Reiner, performing as soloist in concertos including the Beethoven and Mozart A major.

His appearances as violin soloist and guest conductor in Europe and both North and South America were interrupted by World War II, during which he became a senior editor in the U.S. Office of War Information.

Because of his fluency in four languages (English, French, German and Dutch), he translated and edited sensitive documents.

Through a combination of his bureaucratic connections there and contacts from his international performing career, and with assistance from HIAS, he was able to secure the release of his parents from the Nazi concentration camp in Gurs, France, in 1941.

However, upon arriving in Spain, they were thrown in jail by Franco's police.

In 1945 he performed at Carnegie Hall with pianist Artur Balsam.

In 1946 he performed all the Beethoven violin sonatas with pianist Leonard Shure at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Over the next 45 years he made appearances in more than 3,000 concerts in 30 countries, with some 500 concerts in the Los Angeles metropolitan area alone, appearing as violin soloist, conductor of the California Chamber Symphony, first violinist of the Paganini Quartet, and in remarkable chamber music recitals such as the Beethoven sonata cycles with pianists Lili Kraus, Leonard Pennario, Rudolf Firkušný and George Szell, and the Bach violin sonatas with Anthony Newman.

He performed the Bach Double Violin Concerto with David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin, Henryk Szeryng and Jack Benny.

His chamber groups performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles Music Center and the Mark Taper Forum.

Temianka in 1946 joined the Paganini Quartet, founded by the great Belgian cellist Robert Maas.

In 1960 he was the music director at the esteemed Ojai Music Festival.

Temianka was equally adept on the viola as the violin, and sometimes played it during these evenings, as well as in concert in 1962 with Isaac Stern in a performance of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante (which he also performed on violin with William Primrose on viola).

In the 1980s his California Chamber Virtuosi gave concerts at Pepperdine University and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.

As an avid chamber music player, Temianka hosted frequent private musical evenings in his Los Angeles home, playing with fellow musicians including Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Joseph Szigeti, David Oistrakh, Henryk Szeryng, Leonard Pennario, William Primrose, Gregor Piatigorsky and Jean-Pierre Rampal.

In 1980 the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians said of Temianka that he was "...known for his flawless mastery of his instrument, a pure and expressive tone, and forceful yet elegant interpretations."

On July 28, 2016, Jim Svejda at Classical KUSC-FM radio aired a four-hour program of recordings by Temianka, the Paganini Quartet, and the California Chamber Symphony.