Biography
Max Rostal was born in Cieszyn and studied with Carl Flesch. He won the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1925. From 1930-33 he taught at the Berlin Hochschule, from 1944 to 1958 at the Guildhall School of Music, and then at the Musikhochschule Köln (1957–82) and the Conservatory in Bern (1957–85). His pupils included Yfrah Neaman, Howard Leyton-Brown, Igor Ozim, Edith Peinemann, Bryan Fairfax and members of the Amadeus Quartet. He died in Bern.
Rostal played a wide variety of music, but was a particular champion of contemporary works such as Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2. He made a number of recordings.
He premiered Alan Bush's Violin Concerto of 1946-8 in 1949. He was the dedicatee of Benjamin Frankel's first solo violin sonata (1942), and he also made the premiere recording.
He played in a piano trio with Heinz Schröter (piano) and Gaspar Cassadó (cello), who was replaced in 1967 by Siegfried Palm.
He edited a number of works for Schott Music, and produced piano reductions as well.
His daughter Sybil B. G. Eysenck became a psychologist and is the widow of the personality psychologist Hans Eysenck, with whom she collaborated.
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