Louis Krasner

Few musicians experienced the unique professional and musical longevity of Louis Krasner. Beginning in the 1920s, when he became a leading exponent of new music, until the 1980s, when he was still teaching, he was a profound influence on several generations of soloists and listeners. Krasner made very few commercial recordings, but even the handful of recordings he left behind contain some of the most unusual music ever made. Louis Krasner was born in Cherkassy, Russia, but he was brought to the United States at age five, and he studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, and later on in Europe with Carl Fleisch and Lucien Capet. His work in the 1920s included the first performance of the Casella Violin Concerto. He was on good terms with Anton Webern, through whom he became close to other members of the circle of musical figures surrounding Arnold Schoenberg. In the early 1930s, he commissioned a violin concerto from Alban Berg, which the composer wrote partly in memory of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Walter Gropius and Gustav Mahler's widow Alma. Berg's sudden death on Christmas Eve of 1935 left the Violin Concerto as his final work, and Krasner not only performed the premiere of the piece in 1936, but his second performance of the piece on May 1, 1936, with Webern conducting, was recorded and eventually released commercially. Krasner had one of the surviving sets of radio transcription discs which made it possible to issue this historic performance to the public during the 1990s. In 1940, Krasner also gave the premiere of Schoenberg's Violin Concerto, and he later made official commercial recordings of both the Berg and Schoenberg works. Krasner performed throughout Europe in the 1930s, with orchestras in London, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Paris, and Rome, as well as in Boston, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and Philadelphia. He served as the concertmaster of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra from 1944 through 1949 under Dimitri Mitropoulos, a period in which he gave the premiere performance of Roger Sessions' Violin Concerto, and in 1946 he made the first recording of Schoenberg's Serenade. From 1949 until 1972, Krasner held the position of professor of Violin and Chamber Music at Syracuse University in New York. He wrote numerous articles and texts on violin performance and chamber music, and was also an eloquent spokesperson in the 1960s on behalf of government support of the arts. In 1976 he began teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he continued to teach until shortly before his death in 1995. Louis Krasner specialized in a repertory that has only found an audience of any significant size in recent years, and he did this in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Although he was well versed in a huge range of repertory, which he regularly dealt with as the concertmaster in Minneapolis and his other posts, he never favored the world with his thoughts on the violin works of Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. His performances and recordings of the works of Berg and Schoenberg had a special significance in music history, enabling these pieces -- especially the Berg Violin Concerto, an especially beguiling and appealing work (perhaps the only piece of 12-tone music ever to find a relatively wide audience) -- to reach the audiences they deserved. His recording of the Berg concerto from the May 1, 1936 performance with the BBC (released by Continuum/Testament) is also extremely important for offering a glimpse of Anton Webern at the conductor's podium. Webern, who died in 1945 when he was accidentally shot by an American soldier, left no commercial recordings of his own behind.
© Bruce Eder /TiVo