Johan Halvorsen was a Norwegian violinist, conductor, teacher, and
composer born (in Drammen, Norway) on March 15, 1864. He was the kind of violinist we do not
encounter anymore. We have lots of
violinists who are also conductors and teachers – Joshua Bell, Pinchas
Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Jaime Laredo, Maxim Vengerov, and Leonidas Kavakos
quickly come to mind – but no violinist-composers. Although he composed many other works, Halvorsen
will probably remain immortal due to his having composed one of the staples of
the cello-violin (or viola-violin) repertoire – the famous variations on a
theme by Handel. After having studied in
Oslo and Stockholm, he began his career as a concertmaster in Norway (1885) and
Scotland (1888.) He began his studies at
age seven. Later on, his teachers were
Jakob Lindberg (in Stockholm), Adolph Brodsky (in Russia), Adolf Becker (in
Berlin), and Cesar Thomson (in Switzerland.)
In 1889, he was appointed professor of violin at the Helsinki Music
Institute. In 1893, he was appointed
conductor of the Bergen (Norway) Philharmonic.
He was 29 year old. In 1899, he
was appointed conductor of the National Theater in Oslo. By this time, he had established himself as
one of the top musicians in Norway. He
remained at the National Theater until 1929, the year he retired. During this
period, he composed a lot of incidental music for plays as well as concert music. The famous Passacaglia was composed in 1897
although he later revised it several times.
In 1909, he wrote a violin concerto (Opus 28) which he dedicated to Canadian
violinist Kathleen Parlow. After she
premiered it (in the Netherlands) and played it a couple of times in
Norway, the concerto was lost. After
that, it was believed to have been destroyed by Halvorsen although that was not
the case. In January of 2016, it was
announced that the score had been discovered (by James Mason) among sheet music
which had been donated to the University of Toronto many years before. It had been misfiled. The concerto will receive its 21st
century premiere in July of this year – in Norway. The soloist will be Henning Kraggerud. Johan Halvorsen died on December 4, 1935, at
age 71. Here is a video of the Passacaglia.
Kathleen Parlow was a Canadian violinist and teacher born (in Calgary) on September 20, 1890 (Stravinsky was 8 years old.) Today, although there is an abundance of information about her everywhere, she is largely forgotten. Her biography reads – at least somewhat – like that of Camilla Urso and Guila Bustabo combined. She never actually studied in Canada. As a concert violinist, she struggled to make ends meet and finally settled for a teaching career after thirty years of concertizing. Parlow was said to possess a sweet, legato sound that made her seem to be playing with a nine-foot bow and was admired for her effortless playing. At age four, she began her violin studies with a cousin, Conrad Coward, in San Francisco (USA). At age six, she gave her first recital. Still in San Francisco, she continued her studies with Henry Holmes (pupil of Louis Spohr), who helped her obtain playing engagements in England, where he had many good contacts. The expenses for her (and her mother’s) trip and stay in England were paid by Harriet Pullman Carolan of San Francisco, a wealthy admirer. After getting settled there, she played at Wigmore Hall (then known as Bechstein Hall), Buckingham Palace, and other places. She also performed with the London Symphony. She was fifteen years old. In 1906, through the sponsorship of a Canadian industrialist (Lord Strathcona – also known as Donald Alexander Smith), she travelled to Russia for further study. She became the first foreign student enrolled at the St Petersburg Conservatory. Her teacher there was Leopold Auer. Her classmates included Efrem Zimbalist (founder of the Curtis Institute) and Mishel Piastro (for a time, concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony.) She gave nine solo recitals in St Petersburg and learned Alexander Glazunov's violin concerto which she subsequently performed frequently. (Glazunov was then the Director of the Conservatory.) Glazunov later chose her to play his concerto at the Ostend Music Festival in 1907, at which he was a featured composer. She also appeared in Finland several times and even met Jean Sibelius (some sources claim she never met him) whose concerto she often played. Also in 1907, she made her debut in Berlin, thereafter touring in Europe. Parlow later said that, after expenses, her Berlin debut netted her exactly ten pounds. She did not know it at the time but this was an indication of what her future would be like. She would study with Auer each summer in order to prepare additional repertoire for subsequent tours. With time, that repertoire became very extensive. It has been said that she played more than 375 concerts between 1908 and 1915. In Norway, Einar Bjornson – part of the well-to-do Bjornson family - gave her the Viotti Guarnerius (1735) to play on (1908 - 1962.) She also several times played for the King and Queen of Norway. Her first tour in North America began in 1910. In 1911, the New York Herald declared her “one of the phenomena of the musical world,” on a par with Mischa Elman. She also made her first appearance with the Toronto Symphony in February of 1911 – the first of many. Between 1912 and 1925 she lived in England (at Meldreth, near Cambridge) and continued her touring, including tours to China, the U.S., Korea, and Japan (where she recorded for the Nipponophone Company.) In 1912, she played a benefit concert in New York for the survivors of the Titanic disaster. She was highly praised everywhere she played. Her mother, to whom she was very close, accompanied her on all her tours. She recorded several small pieces for Columbia Records between 1914 and 1916. As far as I know, she never recorded after that. Between 1917 and 1919 she was not able to tour outside England due to travel restrictions (due to the First World War.) In 1920, she toured the U.S. for the fifth time and made her first radio broadcast (from Seattle, in 1922.) Considering that her prospects in England were not as good as they had been on the Continent of Europe, they (Parlow and her mother) decided to move to San Francisco (U.S.A. - 1926). It has been stated that she suffered a mental (nervous) breakdown in 1927, perhaps due to a broken personal relationship. They then took a year off, about which – understandably - little is known. In 1929, she toured Mexico – travelling without her mother for the first time. She was 39 years old. Despite playing many concerts there and receiving very high praise, financially, she barely broke even. She later told an interviewer that, when things were very hard, she and her mother had talked about her getting a job to ensure their security for the future but that she just couldn’t do it. She ended up teaching at Mills College (Oakland, California) from 1929 to 1936. They moved to New York in 1936. From 1935 to 1941 she taught in Massachusetts during the summers. In 1941 she was offered a job at the Toronto College of Music and began making appearances with orchestras, a duo she formed with pianist Ernest MacMillan, the Canadian Trio (with Zara Nelsova, cellist, and Macmillan), and a string quartet – the Parlow String Quartet which was active for fifteen years. During this time, she was being assisted financially by Godfrey Ridout (Canadian composer, teacher, writer, and conductor) and other friends. In October of 1959 she was made head of the string department at the London College of Music (Western Ontario, Canada.) Among her pupils were Victor Feldbrill, Joseph Pach, and Marjorie Edwards. In 1982, the CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corporation) broadcast a three-part radio series about her career. The Kathleen Parlow Scholarship was set up with the proceeds from the sale of her Guarnerius and other money from her estate. YouTube has a few videos of her playing (sound only), one of which contains exceptionally fast trills – faster than Heifetz , Prihoda, or Rabin. Parlow died on August 19, 1963, at age 72.
Leopold Auer was a Hungarian violinist, teacher, conductor, and composer born on June 7, 1845 (Brahms was 12 years old.) He was born in a small town and first studied with Kohne in Budapest then with Dont in Vienna but stopped in 1858 when the scholarship money from his wealthy patrons ran out. At that point, being only 13 years of age, he was actually forced to start playing for a living. Auer went on to study with Joseph Joachim for two very critical years in Hanover (1861-1863.) From there, he went to work as an orchestral musician in Dusseldorf and Hamburg. In 1868, a trip to London proved fruitful. There, he met pianist Anton Rubinstein, who invited him to teach at the recently founded (1862) St Petersburg Conservatory. The rest is history, since Auer stayed on for 49 years. Nevertheless, Auer continued to play in the various orchestras of the Imperial Theatres and to perform extensively as soloist in other venues. He was also first violin of the string quartet of the Russian Musical Society for 38 years. He came to the U. S. in 1918, debuting in Carnegie Hall in March of that year – aged 73. He started teaching at the Juilliard School of Music in 1926 and at the Curtis Institute in 1928. Before then, he had taught privately from his home studio. Auer is remembered for refusing to play the Tchaikovsky violin concerto despite its having been dedicated to him and for having produced some of the finest violinists of the early Twentieth Century – Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Mischa Elman, Boris Chumachenko, Iso Briselli, Mishel Piastro, Kathleen Parlow, Toscha Seidel, Emil Mlynarski, and Efrem Zimbalist among them. He was also somewhat unusual in that, unlike most violinists, he did not idolize J.S. Bach, though he played some of Bach’s music for violin. In addition to three books on violin technique, he wrote some pieces which are now seldom played (if at all) and an arrangement of Paganini’s Twenty Fourth Caprice which Heifetz used to play. Auer died on July 15, 1930, at age 85 (Heifetz was 28 years old.)
