Gerhard Taschner

[2] By age 17, having undertaken tours in the United States and Germany,[2] he was concertmaster at the City Theatre of Brno.

In the dying days of the Second World War, the sacked German munitions minister Albert Speer devised a plan to protect the players of the Berlin Philharmonic from the invading Soviet forces.

At the end of the concert, however, the players voted to remain in Berlin, in solidarity with their patrons, who were unable to escape.

However, Taschner left in a car driven by Speer's chauffeur, taking with him his wife, two children, and the daughter of another musician.

After the War he joined the pianist Walter Gieseking and the cellist Ludwig Hoelscher in a celebrated piano trio.

[7] He was mainly responsible for making Khachaturian's Violin Concerto in D minor known in Germany, having had the score made available to him by the Soviets.

[4] In 1948 Taschner played the Dvořák Violin Concerto in Vienna under Leonard Bernstein, who declined to invite him to the United States at that time.

[citation needed] However, he made numerous radio broadcasts and many of these recordings have been re-released, or released for the first time, leading to a latter-day following.

[2] Critical reaction to these recordings varies considerably: one critic compares him with Jascha Heifetz, Bronisław Huberman, Nathan Milstein and Ginette Neveu when it comes to intensity of expression and richness in sound colours,[7] but another says he is not in the same league as Joseph Szigeti, Isolde Menges, Emil Telmányi or Szymon Goldberg.