Guila Bustabo

Guila Bustabo (February 25, 1916 – April 27, 2002) was a prominent American concert and recital violinist.

Guila Bustabo was born in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in 1916 as Teressina Bustabo. She began playing the violin at age two. At age three, she played privately for , the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. At age three, her family moved to Chicago so that she could study with Ray Huntington at the Chicago Musical College. Before she was five, she was studying in Chicago with Leon Samétini, a former pupil of the 19th-early 20th century virtuoso and composer Eugène Ysaÿe. By age nine, she performed with the Chicago Symphony and as a young prodigy she also performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the National Orchestral Association. Still a prodigy, she then studied at the Juilliard School under Louis Persinger.

Her career was always tightly controlled by her mother, Blanche. Guila Bustabo once said, "Menuhin got away from his parents. He was lucky. I never got away from mine." Yehudi Menuhin was one of her Juilliard classmates.

She made her Carnegie Hall concert debut at age fifteen, playing the Wieniawski Violin Concerto No. 2. A year later, she made her Carnegie Hall recital debut with Louis Persinger at the piano, to an audience that included Arturo Toscanini. At age eighteen, she toured England, continental Europe and Asia. That same year, she acquired a Guarneri del Gesu violin. Her acquisition of this rare instrument is variously attributed to help from a group of professional musicians including Toscanini, to Fritz Kreisler, and to the British aristocrat Lady Ravensdale. It is possible that all were involved. In 1938 and 1939, she returned to New York, giving "poised and expressive" performances with the New York Philharmonic.

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