Loewenguth Quartet

Personnel

The founding line-up of the Loewenguth Quartet was:

From the early 1960s the desks were occupied thus:

The quartet was dissolved in 1983 at the death of the founder.

Origins

Alfred Loewenguth was born in Paris in 1911. He formed his first string quartet in 1929, but appeared in public as a violinist first in 1936.

Loewenguth began to study the violin at 8 years old, and had his first pupil when he was 12. At 16, he entered the Conservatoire National de Paris, and he set up his own Violin School when he was 17. At 19 he won the first prize at the Conservatoire, and principal medals for chamber music and solfeggio. For chamber music he was a pupil of André Tourret and Roger Ducasse. In 1959 he founded the Alfred Loewenguth Youth Orchestras, and in 1969 he set up the Music Festival of the Orangerie de Sceaux. He both founded and directed the Conservatoire of the 9th arrondissement of Paris, and taught at the Conservatoire of Stuttgart, at the Schola Cantorum de Paris, and at the Académie Internationale at Nice. Although he devoted the core of his musical work to teaching and to chamber music - with his quartet or in duo (for more than fifty years with the pianist Françoise Doreau), he also had a career as soloist. The cinematographer Benoit Jacquot devoted a documentary called "Enfance Musique" to him in 1979.

The Loewenguth Quartet appearances in Southern Africa were hugely successful, and they completed three tours, in 1955, 56, and 64.

Alfred Loewenguth died in 1983.

The quartet performed the complete quartets of Beethoven in a series of 6 concerts over three consecutive weekends in November 1948 in New York. On 12 November 1948 they gave the premiere of the 6th quartet, op. 64 (1947) of Egon Wellesz at the Library of Congress. In the same year they also performed the complete Beethoven series for the Casavant Society in Montreal. The quartet performed Priaulx Rainier's string quartet at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949.

Recordings

The Loewenguth Quartet made many recordings on 78rpm and 33rpm discs, for various labels including Deutsche Grammofon (and Archiv), Vox, Philips, Westminster, Les Discophiles Français, Club National du Disque and some smaller French and American labels.