WALTER LEVIN Born 1924 violinist

The founder and original first violinist of the Lasalle Quartet, Walter Levin was also a notable teacher in Cincinnati where his pupils included Christian Tetzlaff. Born in Berlin to a Germanjewish family of amateur musicians, Levin began violin and piano lessons aged five. Fleeing Nazi persecution, his family moved to Tel Aviv in 1938. After World War II, he studied at New York’s Juilliard School where, encouraged by the School’s president, William Schuman, he formed the Lasalle Quartet. By Levin’s graduation in 1949, the Lasalle included Henry Meyer on second violin, violist Peter Kamnitzer and cellist Jack Kirstein. Praised in Romantic repertoire, the Lasalle revived Zemlinsky’s almost forgotten work, and built a reputation for championing the Second Viennese School, recording the complete quartets of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern for Deutsche Grammophon in the 1970s. They also gave the premieres of Lutos√awski’s String Quartet in Stockholm in 1965, and Ligeti’s Second Quartet, a work dedicated to the Lasalle, in Baden-baden in 1969.