Vladimir Cosma is a Romanian violinist, composer, and conductor born (in
Bucharest) on April 13, 1940. He is one
of several musicians who began their careers as violinists and digressed to
other (musical) endeavors. In France, he is
well-known as a prolific film composer although he is a composer of classical
(concert) works as well. Perhaps he can
be compared to Victor Young, American violinist-composer. There is scant information about Cosma’s
career as a violinist other than that he began his violin studies while still
quite young and he graduated from the Bucharest Conservatory of Music and then
moved on to the Paris Conservatory in 1963.
In Paris, he also studied with Nadia Boulanger, the famous French
teacher. Up until about 1968 (between
1964 and 1967 approximately), he played in orchestras and toured as a concert violinist. After that, he focused on composition and
(necessarily) on conducting. He credits
a meeting with French composer Michel Legrand with his entry into the world of
soundtrack composing. He was 28 years
old by then. It has been said that one
of his grandmothers (I don’t know which one) studied with the famous piano
player, Ferruccio Busoni. According to
one (usually-reliable) source, Cosma is the composer of more than 300 scores
for films and television programs. Another
source puts the number at 150. He has
conducted a number of orchestras outside of the recording studios though mostly in France. The French government has bestowed several
honors on him as he is considered a national artistic treasure. Several of his scores have also been awarded the French equivalent of an Academy Award. As you can see from the
photo, Cosma has never entirely given up the violin. Whether he has or has ever had any pupils is
something I do not know. He is on record saying that melody is the most important thing in a composition. In an
interview, Cosma was quoted as follows: “In a few centuries, we shall see what
will come of the serial experiments and of these [atonal] composers. I think that all this decadence of the
Viennese romantic music is an end and not a beginning as, for such a long time,
Boulez and the promoters of new music wanted to make us believe.” Here is a YouTube audio file of one of his film works featuring the Berlin Philharmonic - I don't think I need to identify the violin soloist because you will immediately recognize it is the inimitable Ivry Gitlis.
Victor Young was an American violinist, composer, arranger, and conductor, born (in Chicago) on August 8, 1899 (two years before Heifetz was born.) He is an example of instrumentalists who gravitate from concertizing to other endeavors – in his case, composing, arranging, and conducting for films and records. Violinists Iso Briselli, Pierre Monteux, Jaap Van Zweden, Eddy Brown, and Joseph Achron are five others who more-or-less switched careers as other things drew their attention. Young is remembered as having been nominated for an Academy Award 22 times (an all-time record) and never actually winning – in any case, not while he was alive. He began violin studies with Isidor Lotto (pupil of Joseph Lambert Massart and teacher of Bronislaw Huberman) at the Warsaw Conservatory at age 10 and later studied piano with Isidor Philipp (pupil of Camille Saint Saens) at the Paris Conservatory. Being highly gifted, at age 13, he made his debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic. He toured Europe as a soloist for a while, but with the outbreak of World War One in 1914, his grandparents, who had been raising him since his arrival in Europe, sent him back to the U.S. Young then embarked on a career as an orchestral violinist with popular and classical orchestras, often serving as concertmaster or conductor in theatre and radio orchestras, all the while teaching himself the art of arranging popular music. He was barely 16 years old. These activities were mostly centered in Chicago. He played in the Isham Jones and Ted Fiorito orchestras during this time - other members of the Jones orchestra were Woody Herman and Benny Goodman, both of whom would become more famous than Young. He participated in early recordings with Bing Crosby and radio programs with Betty Grable too. In New York, where he moved in 1931, Young recorded with Tommy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Al Jolson, and Lee Wiley (his girlfriend), among many others. In 1933, he started writing music for films, his first one being Murder at the Vanities (a rather obscure but notorious film. Some sources say his first movie score was Wells Fargo – a film about the stage coach company, not the bank.) In 1934, Young signed a contract with Decca Records and stayed with them for the rest of his life. In 1936, he moved to Hollywood, initially writing music for Paramount Pictures and leading the orchestra at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. In Hollywood, he eventually wrote soundtracks for movies and television and recorded with many legendary stars, Judy Garland among them. His scores include Golden Boy, Around the World in Eighty Days, Shane, Samson and Delilah, Scaramouche, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is known that Young was a workaholic. In fact, he died while working on a movie score (China Gate), on November 10, 1956, at age 57. By then, he had worked on over 350 movies and had spent almost 90 percent of his professional life in the popular music sphere. It had been a long way from the Warsaw Philharmonic to the Hollywood sound studios. Brandeis University (Boston) has a collection containing more than one hundred scores and recordings of Young's music. About Victor Young, Henry Mancini has been quoted as saying “All he had to do was sit down at the piano and the melodies fell out of his sleeves.”
Isidor Lotto (Izydor Lotto) was a Polish violinist, teacher, and composer born (in Warsaw) on December 22, 1840 (Paganini died that same year and Brahms was 7 years old.) Some sources give the year of his birth as 1844. Even though he lived a long life which covered some of the most outstanding events in classical music history and had a few prominent pupils in an important music school, details of his life remain obscure. Other than that his family was poor, little is known of his early life. His father may have been a street musician and little Isidor could well have played with him as he made the rounds of the Warsaw taverns. At age 12 (1852), he received financial backing from wealthy patrons that allowed him to study at the Paris Conservatoire. Upon arriving in Paris, he gave a concert at Herz Hall (Salle Herz.) His principal teachers at the Conservatory were Joseph Lambert Massart (pupil of Rodolphe Kreutzer and teacher of Eugene Ysaye, Henryk Wieniawski, and Fritz Kreisler as well), Napoleon Reber (teacher of Benjamin Goddard), and Ambroise Thomas. At graduation (1855), he made a very successful debut in Paris. He toured briefly in Germany and Poland after that then, in 1862, was appointed solo violinist and chamber virtuoso to the Grand Duke in Weimar (J.S. Bach lived and worked in Weimar for nine years, more than one hundred years before this.) Lotto was either 18 or 22 years old, depending on the actual year of his birth. He was also later appointed professor of violin at the Warsaw Conservatory (Warsaw Music Academy), all the while sporadically concertizing in Europe. Ten years later, in 1872, he was appointed professor at the Conservatory in Strasbourg (in northeastern France, on the border with Germany, now the official seat of the European Parliament); however, due to ill health, he was mostly unable to teach there and very soon afterward returned to Warsaw. (A usually reliable source (Grove's Dictionary, which is, of course, not infallibe) has it that Lotto taught at the Strasbourg Conservatory from 1873 to 1880.) He taught at the Warsaw Conservatory for many years - I don’t know how many - presumably until his death. Lotto was also concertmaster of the Warsaw Opera Orchestra during this time. His most famous pupils were Bronislaw Huberman, who probably only studied with him for three months (either in Paris or at the Warsaw Conservatory), prior to 1892, Richard Burgin (concertmaster of the Boston Symphony), Joseph Achron (violinist-composer), Victor Young (violinist-composer), and Henryk Heller (violinist-theorist.) A contemporary account of his playing declared that Lotto’s virtuosity rivaled Wieniawski’s, though, of course, his fame now does not even come close. It is indicative of how carelessly some records are passed down from one generation to the next that even Lotto's year of death is in question. According to Grove's Dictionary, Lotto died on July 13, 1927, though another very reliable source gives the year of his death as 1936 - the day itself is not in question. Depending on which dates one relies on, he was either 82, 87, 91, or 95 years old. The few pieces he composed for violin (which include 5 violin concertos) are now never played.
