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The Gold Standard

The Juilliard String Quartet
comes to Detroit with
the premiere of a new work
memorializing a beloved
Jewish violinist.

DIANA LIEBERMAN
Copy Editor/Entertainment Writer

t was 1936, and the 25-year-old
Felix Galimar took his seat for the
first time in the violin section of the
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
"When the lights went down, just before
the conductor raised his baton," he recalled
in an interview 60 years later, "the first
clarinetist called out in a voice that could
be heard throughout the theater, `Galimar,
have you eaten your matzahs today?'"
Fired from the orchestra the following
year, for reasons management said were
"beyond their control," the Sephardic
Jewish violinist fled to Palestine, where he
performed with conductor Arturo
Toscanini in the newly formed Palestine

Violinists Joel Smirnoff and Ronald Copes, cellist Joel Krosnick and violist Samuel Rhodes make up
the Juilliard String Quartet: "The yardstick against which all other groups are measured."

9/20
2002

74

Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic
Orchestra).
By 1939, both Galimar and Toscanini
had taken their places in the New York
Philharmonic.
This was the start of Galimar's long and
fruitful career as a New York-based orches-
tra and chamber musician, teacher and
coach, a career that earned him the love
and esteem of generations of colleagues
and students — including Samuel Rhodes,
violist of the Juilliard String Quartet.
Rhodes had played in Galimar's string
quartet — a quartet the Austrian-born
Galimar had begun with his three sisters
— for nine years before joining the
Juilliard in 1969.
The Juilliard String Quartet will pre-
miere a work dedicated to Galimar in their