Léon Barzin

Léon Eugene Barzin (November 27, 1900 – April 29, 1999) was a Belgian-born American conductor and founder of the National Orchestral Association (NOA), the oldest surviving training orchestra in the United States. Barzin was also the founding musical director of the New York City Ballet.

Born in Brussels, Belgium on November 27, 1900, Léon Barzin was taken to the United States at the age of two. He studied the violin with his father (principal viola at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels and later of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra), and later with Édouard Deru, Pierre Henrotte and Eugène Ysaye. He joined the New York Philharmonic in 1919 as a violinist and was appointed first viola in 1925, a position he retained until 1929, collaborating in those years with Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Arturo Toscanini. It was at Toscanini's encouragement that he began his conducting career. In 1930 he was named principal conductor and musical director of the National Orchestral Association, America's leading proving ground for young professionals and a springboard for generations of young American instrumentalists. In this capacity he had a notable success for three decades. In public concerts and in weekly rehearsals, reaching a wide audience through the New York municipal radio station, he groomed his players in performances of the standard repertory.

Léon Barzin's influence on the quality of symphonic performance in the United States was enormous and long lasting, as thousands of young professional players emerged from the NOA to fill the ranks of the great American symphonic, ballet and opera orchestras. In 1958 he resigned from the association and moved to Paris, where he founded the Orchestre Philharmonique de Paris - giving weekly concerts in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées - and taught conducting at the Schola Cantorum de Paris. He returned to New York as Music Director of the National Orchestral Association in 1970. In 1973 he took the NOA to Italy, where it was orchestra in residence at the Spoleto Festival Di Due Mondi, participating in Luchino Visconti's legendary production of Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescaut. He resigned in 1976.

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