In Wednesday’s (5/9) New York Times, Bruce Webber writes, “Roman Totenberg, a Polish-born violin prodigy who came of age in the era of expressive players like Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz, shared their virtuosity and influenced generations of musicians as a teacher, died on Tuesday at his home in Newton, Mass. He was 101. … Mr. Totenberg performed as a soloist with major orchestras in the United States and Europe and appeared on dozens if not hundreds of recordings. He was, at different times, a colleague of Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Leopold Stokowski, Arthur Rubinstein and Yehudi Menuhin. At Menuhin’s home in Alma, Calif., in the 1940s, he formed the Alma Trio with the pianist Adolph Bailer and the cellist Gabor Rejto. As a soloist, Mr. Totenberg gave premiere performances of violin concertos by Darius Milhaud, Karol Szymanowski and William Schuman and sonatas by Paul Hindemith and Arthur Honegger. His performances of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto helped lift it into the canon. … He created his most formidable legacy at Boston University, where he spent more than half a century and which held a 100th-birthday concert in his honor at Symphony Hall in Boston in November 2010. Among the performers that night were two former students, the noted soloist Mira Wang and Na Sun, a member of the New York Philharmonic.”
Posted May 9, 2012
