JAVS Summer 1998

Robert Mann

Invocation

for Violin and Viola

Robert Mann, founder of the Juilliard String Quartet, was born 19 July 1920 in Portland, Oregon. In 1938 he won a scholarship to the Institute ofMusical Art in New York and went on to the Juilliard Graduate School. In 1941 he won the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation competition and made his New York debut. In 1946, on discharge from the army, and at the invitation ofWilliam Schuman, then president ofJuil liard, Mann formed the Juilliard String Quartet with Robert Koff, Arthur Winograd, and Raphael Hillyer. Juilliard String Quartet now looks back on more than 4500 concerts, not only in the United States, but throughout forty-three countries. The Quartet's repertoire includes over 550 works, more than 150 by twentieth-century composers, and it is especially noted for its championship of American composers. In the summer of 1948 it made nationwide headlines for the performance of the complete Bart6k quartets at the Berkshire Music festival in Tanglewood. After a final concert at Tanglewood in July 1997, Mann retired from the Quartet to devote more time to composing, conducting, and performing nonquartet repertoire. Robert Mann has composed more than thirty works for narrator with various instruments, several of which have been recorded on the Musical Heritage label. His Fantasy for orchestra was performed by Dimitri Mitropoulos with the New York and the Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. Other works include a violin-piano duo premiered at Carnegie Hall by Itzhak Perlman and a string quartet included in the reper toires of the LaSalle and Concord quartets. Appearances as a conductor include concerts with the Juilliard, Jupiter,- and Seattle symphonies, as well as with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a recording of music by Bart6k. He has received honorary doctorates from Oberlin, Earlham, and Jacksonville colleges, Michigan State University, and San Francisco Conservatory. He has been elected a member of the American Academy ofArts and Sciences. Robert Mann is married to actress Lucy Rowan, who performs with the "Robert Mann Players," and has a daughter, Lisa, a clinical psychologist, and a son, Nicholas, a gifted violinist and violist who often plays duo recitals with his father and is himself a founding member of the Mendelssohn String Quartet.

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