Brenton Langbein

Langbein was born on 21 January 1928 in the South Australian town of Gawler to James Langbein, an accomplished pianist who had set up a car dealership and garage business in Gawler, and his second wife, Juanita Zadow.^[1][2] His parents were of German and Scottish ancestry, his father's grandfather, Joachim Heinrich Gottfried Langbein, having arrived in South Australia from Mecklenburg in 1845.^[2][3][4] He began learning violin at age five from Sister Mary Ludovic at the teaching Sisters of the Good Samaritan Convent, Gawler, where he was educated.^[5][6][7] He also studied piano under Adele Wiebusch, who additionally supervised his daily music practice at school when he was a child.^[5][6][8] He gave his first local public performance at the age of five-and-a-half and his first recital aged seven.^[7][9][10] By 1936 when he was eight, he was travelling to Adelaide weekly for violin lessons with Sylvia Whitington at the Elder Conservatorium of Music. In that year he gave a recital there on both violin and piano, including his own compositions, among which was a cradle song for his baby sister.^[5] At age nine he won a Eugene Alderman Scholarship for a further three years' tuition^[11] at the Conservatorium, where he was taught by Ludwig Schwab, and began to perform with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra at age fourteen.^[4] He attended Gawler High School and graduated from the University of Adelaide with a Bachelor of Music.^[2][12] In 1948 he moved to Sydney, where he performed as a soloist and as a member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and studied composition with Sir Eugene Goosens.^[4]

He moved to Switzerland in 1951 to study with Paul Grümmer; during this period he was also taught by Pablo Casals and spent six weeks studying in Vienna with Ernst Morawec.^{[2][4][13][14][15][16]} In 1953 he settled in Zürich, where he became a member of Paul Sacher's Collegium Musicum Zürich chamber orchestra in 1954 and its concertmaster two years after that; he later became the concertmaster of Sacher's Basel Chamber Orchestra.^[3][4][17] He was appointed Professor of Violin at the City of Basel Music Academy, and formed a duo with Australian pianist Maureen Jones and then a trio with fellow Australian horn player Barry Tuckwell.^[4] In the 1960s he founded Die Kammermusiker Zürich, a chamber orchestra that performed music by little-known and contemporary composers, along with youth orchestra schools in Zürich and Basel.^[3][4][18]

He was the soloist at the premiere of Hans Werner Henze's Violin Concerto No. 2, which was dedicated to Langbein, at the 1972 Adelaide Festival of Arts and co-founded Opera Factory later in the 1970s.^[3][4] He was the musical director of the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra and co-founded the Barossa Festival, a chamber music festival in South Australia's Barossa Valley, in 1990.^[4][19]

Langbein gave his last concert in Siena, Italy, in early April 1993. He died of cancer in Zürich on 6 June of that year, aged 65, and is buried in the Barossa Valley town of Lyndoch.^[3][4]

Langbein received an award of honour from the Canton of Zürich in 1983 and the Nageli Medal from the City of Zürich, an award for musicians that he had co-founded, in 1988.^[4][16][20] In the 1986 Queen's Birthday Honours he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for service to music.^[21] The Brenton Langbein Theatre, part of the Barossa Convention Centre in Tanunda, is named after him,^[4][22] as is the Langbein String Quartet, run by the Firm, a South Australian contemporary music organisation.^[23] Hans Werner Henze wrote a solo viola composition, An Brenton, as a tribute to Langbein shortly after his death.^[17] The Swiss composer Hermann Haller wrote his very last work, Blätterfall..., written for the Kammermusiker Zürich, "to the memory of Brenton Langbein ".^[24] His papers and other ephemera were donated to the Mortlock Library at the State Library of South Australia.^[2][25]

Among Langbein's compositions, a string quintet has been recorded. His only composition with an opus number is his Prelude, Marche & Valse, Op. 1. Manuscripts of his compositions are among his papers at the State Library of South Australia.^[26][27]