Word: barzin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week for the first time in the U. S. an orchestra announced that it was for hire. Sponsor of the venture was U. S. Conductor Leon Barzin, who has long mulled over the problem of how U. S. pianists and fiddlers who are not headliners can get a chance to play with an orchestra. Conductor Barzin's new American Orchestra, a professional, unionized, 72-man group of players, offered its services to soloists at a minimum price of $1,800 per concert. First taker, who appeared last week in a Carnegie Hall concert with the new group...
...prices ranging from $1 to $5,000. Of the 130 young men and women who comprise the orchestra, many are on scholarships, pay as little as $1 a year tuition, and especially needy students receive money for rent and clothing. Conductor of the association is tall, slim Violist Leon Barzin (TIME, July 31, 1933), 37, who gathers the students thrice weekly in Carnegie Hall Chamber Music room for rehearsals, works them to a frazzle for two hours and a half, shouts at them when they play badly. He has been conductor since 1930. Though Conductor Barzin does not promise...
...dark slip of a boy with intense brown eyes and a rapt expression was usually concealed where he could watch and hear all that transpired, not on the stage, but in the orchestra pit, where his father played a viola. The father was a Belgian. The son, Leon Barzin, had been brought up in New Orleans but the rest of his youth was to be spent in Manhattan where, by the age of 20, he had achieved a second violinist's chair in the Philharmonic. In 1925 he became first violinist...
...rise further than that would be the aspiration of few young U. S. musicians, but Leon Barzin rose further. Since 1930 he has been director of the National Orchestra Association, which trains students in orchestra technique and conducting, presents them in concerts. The best pupils graduate into the big orchestras, to sit on chairs under great conductors as Leon Barzin's father did, as he was not content to do. This summer came the next step upward in Leon Barzin's career. Willem van Hoogstraten, official conductor of the Philharmonic-Symphony in its summer concerts at Lewisohn Stadium...
...spite of only one rehearsal, youthful Conductor Barzin produced smooth, energetic interpretations of a program scarcely calculated to arouse enthusiasm. He is partial to his contemporaries, likes to balance comparable works by modern Europeans and Americans. His audiences at the Stadium heard seven U. S. composers, including three New Yorkers, Philip James (Overture in Olden Style on French Noels), Robert Braine (S. O. S.), Deems Taylor (Through the Looking Glass). Without frills, Barzin directs in a kinetic physical style, occasionally threatens to get ahead of his orchestra in timing. But some critics found the concerts directed by him the best...