Max Rostal

Max Rostal (7 July 1905 – 6 August 1991) was a violinist and a viola player.

He was Austrian-born, but later took British citizenship.

Max Rostal was born in Cieszyn to a Jewish merchant family.

As a child prodigy, he started studying the violin at the age of 5, and played in front of Emperor Franz Josef I in 1913.

He studied with Carl Flesch.

He also studied theory and composition with Emil Bohnke and Matyás Seiber.

He won the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1925.

In 1930–33 he taught at the Berlin Hochschule, from 1944 to 1958 at the Guildhall School of Music, and then at the Musikhochschule Köln (1957–82) and the Conservatory in Bern (1957–85).

His pupils included Maria Vischnia, Yfrah Neaman, Paulo Bosísio, Howard Leyton-Brown, Igor Ozim, Ole Bøhn, Peggy Klinger, Paul Rozeck, Edith Peinemann, Bryan Fairfax and members of the Amadeus Quartet.

He was the dedicatee of Benjamin Frankel's first solo violin sonata (1942), and he also made the premiere recording.

He commissioned the violin concerto by Bernard Stevens in 1943.

In 1945, in honour of Flesch, he co-founded what was later known as the Carl Flesch International Violin Competition with Edric Cundell.

Rostal played a wide variety of music, but was a particular champion of contemporary works such as Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2.

He made a number of recordings.

Rostal premiered Alan Bush's Violin Concerto of 1946–8 in 1949.

Rostal played in a piano trio with Heinz Schröter (piano) and Gaspar Cassadó (cello), who was replaced in 1967 by Siegfried Palm.

He edited a number of works for Schott Music, and also produced piano reductions.

Rostal's daughter Sybil B. G. Eysenck became a psychologist and is the widow of the personality psychologist Hans Eysenck, with whom she collaborated.

Rostal died in Bern.