Henri Temianka
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.
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.
[5] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle on November 11, 1946, "Perhaps never before has one heard a string quartet with so rich, mellow and superbly polished a tone."
On December 5, 1947, the Los Angeles Examiner reported, "Entrusted with fabulously sensitive string instruments that once were in the personal collection of Paganini, they achieve the incredible - as will be eagerly testified by the packed house..." During its 20-year international career, the Paganini Quartet concertized continuously in large cities and small towns throughout the United States, as well as in famous concert halls around the world.
Soloists who performed with the CCS under Temianka's direction included David Oistrakh, Christine Walevska, Jean-Pierre Rampal and Benny Goodman.
He recognized and was in many instances responsible for the first appearances of a number of rising musicians, including Christopher Parkening, Jeffrey Kahane, Nathaniel Rosen, Paul Shenley, Timothy Landauer, Daniel Heifetz, and Los Romeros, a family of guitarists from Spain.
Unique concerts given under the auspices of the CCS included the opera Noye's Fludde by Benjamin Britten, in which hundreds of children participated; a "Monster Concert", in which 12 Steinway pianos and 36 pianists were brought on stage for pieces by Louis Moreau Gottschalk and others; Alberto Ginastera's Cantata para America Magica, an extraordinary work based on pre-Columbian Latin American songs and scored for soprano and 53 percussion instruments; and Christus Apollo, a cantata written by Jerry Goldsmith, based on a text by Ray Bradbury and narrated by Charlton Heston.
These remarkable instruments—the viola had inspired Paganini to commission Hector Berlioz's Harold en Italie—were also played by the Cleveland Quartet for almost 15 years, beginning in 1982, and are presently owned by Nippon Music Foundation of Japan, after deacquisition by the Corcoran Gallery in the mid-1990s for $15 million.
[14] Henri Temianka's students included Leo Berlin (who became concertmaster of the Stockholm Philharmonic), Nina Bodnar (who won the 1982 Thibaud International Competition in Paris), Amalia Castillo, Alison Dalton (subsequently in the first violin section of the Chicago Symphony), Marilyn Doty, Eugene Fodor, Michael Mann, Dolores Miller, Phyllis Moad, Astrid Schween, Karen Tuttle (who later became a violist), and Camilla Wicks.
As we play, unrehearsed, a quartet of Beethoven or Mozart, there are extraordinary flashes of insight, thrilling moments of truth when we share the same concept of an exquisite phrase, sculpt the same melodic line, linger and savor the same ritardando or diminuendo.
[15] In the 1930s Temianka made solo recordings, mostly on the Parlophone label, of works by Henryk Wieniawski, Gaetano Pugnani, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johann Sebastian Bach, Karol Szymanowski, Pablo de Sarasate, Camille Saint-Saëns, Anton Arensky, Jean Sibelius and Frank Bridge.
In the LP era, he recorded sonatas by George Frideric Handel, Édouard Lalo, Vincent d'Indy, Paul Dukas, Edvard Grieg and Antonín Dvořák, and the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio in A minor.
He also appeared as violin soloist in a 1941 recording of Richard Strauss's Don Quixote by the Pittsburgh Symphony under Fritz Reiner, featuring cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.
About one-third of these essays concerned string playing and teaching and have recently been collated into a privately printed anthology augmented with photographs from his archives.
