Ernest Fleischmann

Ernest Martin Fleischmann (December 7, 1924 – June 13, 2010) was a German-born American impresario who served for 30 years as executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he upgraded to become a top-ranked orchestra. A talented musician, he chose a career on the business aspect of music, rather than a life as a conductor.

Fleischmann was born in Frankfurt am Main on December 7, 1924, to Gustav and Toni (née Koch). His Jewish family fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to South Africa. There he learned music as a teenager and made his debut as a professional conductor in 1942, when he was only 17 years old. He earned an undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of the Witwatersrand and received a degree in music from the University of Cape Town. He organized music for the Johannesburg Festival starting in 1956, for which he commissioned William Walton to create the Johannesburg Festival Overture in honor of the city's 70th anniversary. He married Elsa Leviseur in 1953, who practiced as an Architect in South Africa, US and England.

In 1959, he took a position as general manager of the London Symphony Orchestra, spurning an offer from the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra. In London, he arranged for the orchestra to perform an annual season at Carnegie Hall in New York City and commissioned works by Richard Rodney Bennett and Sir Arthur Bliss, in addition to exchange concerts with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. He left the LSO in 1967 and worked for a short time as the European director of CBS Masterworks Records.

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