Henryk Szeryng

Henryk Szeryng (1918–1988) was a Polish-born violinist who later became a Mexican citizen and one of the leading violinists of the 20th century. Born in Warsaw, he began studying violin at the age of seven and studied with Carl Flesch in Berlin from 1929 to 1932, then with Jacques Thibaud at the Paris Conservatoire, where he won the first prize in violin in 1937; he also studied composition with Nadia Boulanger from 1933 to 1939. He made his Warsaw debut in 1933 performing Brahms’s Violin Concerto. During World War II, he served the Polish government-in-exile as an interpreter and helped arrange the emigration of Polish refugees to Mexico; he settled in Mexico after the war and became a professor at the University of Mexico in 1946. His international career was relaunched after pianist Arthur Rubinstein heard him perform in Mexico City in 1953, leading to their collaboration and a New York debut in 1956. His major recordings included Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas with Rubinstein (recorded 1958, released 1960), Brahms’s Violin Concerto with Pierre Monteux (1959), Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Charles Munch (1959), Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole (1961), Brahms’s Violin Sonatas with Rubinstein (1962), Bach’s complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (1968), and concertos by Berg, Szymanowski and Wieniawski in the 1970s. From the 1960s onward he recorded extensively for Philips, Mercury and Deutsche Grammophon, including the complete Beethoven Piano Trios with Wilhelm Kempff and Pierre Fournier; a 44-CD Decca box set collecting his major recordings was issued in 2018 to mark the centenary of his birth. He died in Kassel, West Germany, in 1988, aged 69.

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