Walter Levin

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Walter Levin (December 6, 1924 – August 4, 2017) was the founder, first violinist, and guiding spirit of the

Levin and his LaSalle Quartet graduated from Juilliard in 1949, and obtained an appointment as quartet in residence at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In the summer preceding the start of that appointment, they were joined by violist Peter Kamnitzer, whom they had known from Juilliard, and who remained with the quartet until its retirement in 1987. At Colorado College the quartet taught, gave concerts, and undertook a series of children's concerts which was to continue throughout their career—it has been Levin's lifelong conviction that classical musicians have a responsibility to develop the next generation of classical music lovers as well as the younger generation of performers.

After four years at Colorado College, the quartet was invited to

The quartet toured internationally beginning with a tour of Europe in 1954. Its participation in the famous Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in the 1950s led to a series of commissions to contemporary composers, most notably György Ligeti and Luigi Nono, and also to many world premieres, including the quartets by Krzysztof Penderecki and Witold Lutosławski.

The quartet became famous, especially in the United States, in 1971 as a result of the unexpected success of its recording for Deutsche Grammophon of the complete string quartet music of the chief representatives of the Second Viennese School: Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. This set, and the LaSalle's subsequent recordings of the late quartets of Beethoven have been continuously in print since their first release.

The quartet also recorded a significant part of its contemporary music repertory for Deutsche Grammophon, and its recordings of the quartets by Alexander Zemlinksky contributed significantly to the renaissance of interest in his operatic, symphonic, and chamber music.

Teaching

Throughout his career Levin was a dedicated teacher of young musicians: he had begun teaching during his years in Palestine, and continued during his four years at Juilliard in New York. He was subsequently the prime mover in the LaSalle Quartet's ongoing series of children's concerts, in which he and the quartet introduced even elementary school children to the string quartet repertory and gave them a basic exposure to the give and take of chamber music. The LaSalle Quartet itself was always a quartet in residence, first at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, 1949–1953, and then at College Conservatory Music in Cincinnati, 1953–1987.

In addition to giving four concerts at the College Conservatory each year, Levin and the other members of the quartet not only taught their instruments individually, but also taught young quartets under a scholarship program initiated by Levin, among them the Alban Berg, Artis, Brahms, Buchberger, Pražák, and Vogler Quartets.

Following the LaSalle Quartet's retirement in 1987, Levin continued to teach young quartets, at the College Conservatory through 1989, at the Steans Institute at Ravinia, at the Basel Academy of Music, and at the Lübeck Academy of Music; these quartets have included the Alma, Amaryllis, Arco Iris, Ardeo, Ariel, Arpeggione, Artemis, Basler, Benaïm, Bennewitz, Casals, Castagneri, Debussy, Doric, Gémeaux, Harmony-Shanghai, Kuss, Lotus, Minguet, Pavel Haas, Pellegrini, Ponche, Prinse, Prisma, Quiroga, Sonos, Viktor Ullmann, Zemlinsky, and Zwiebel string quartets.

Many of Levin's violin students hold positions in major orchestras around the world; his most prominent violin student is the virtuoso soloist, chamber musician, and conductor Christian Tetzlaff. Violinists and string quartet players are not Levin's only students: the pianist Stefan Litwin is also his student, as is in many respects the Percussion Group Cincinnati. Levin's most famous student, however, is the pianist and conductor James Levine, who began lessons with Levin in Cincinnati at the age of ten in 1953 and continued his studies with Levin until entering Juilliard in 1961.

Philosophy

Levin's philosophy of interpretation can be summarized as a search to know, by a combination of historical research and structural analysis, a composer's exact intentions, and to realize those intentions in the performance of works that have influenced the subsequent course of musical history and that can reveal new aspects for the present when considered from the standpoint of the most advanced contemporary music. As a result, it was in Levin's view as essential to know and perform the most difficult works of the present as it is to perform the works of the past: only through an intellectually rigorous dialectic of past and present can any work be brought to life in performance.

Levin insisted that the details of interpretation of any given work can only be understood in relation to a larger grasp of the work as a whole, while the work as a whole can only be understood via a sustained grappling with its details. In this sophisticated hermeneutic of history and structure, Levin's primary aim was to convey in its full intensity the rhetoric of the music: its meaning, and for an understanding of this he turns to sources of musical rhetoric primarily in vocal music: opera, choral works, and song.

In pursuit of these ideals, Levin insisted on the importance of studying all available sources, the history of interpretive practice, and the need of chamber ensembles to learn their repertory playing from scores rather than parts, not only so that each may see what the others are playing, but so that all may develop the crucial sense of the whole and its implicit unity, to which every aspect of the interpretation and performance must contribute.

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