Maurice Gendron

Maurice Gendron (December 26th, 1920 - August 20th, 1990) was a Violoncelliste French.

Biography

Maurice Gendron was born close to Nice on December 26th, 1920, in a poor family, of a mother violonist in the orchestra of the theater and of a father who gave up them early. Maurice accepted his first lessons of violin at four years, but without withdrawing great pleasure from it. He passed as of five years to the violoncello and withdrew a much greater satisfaction from it.

Its first professor, Stephan Odero, took it along to ten years to listen to Emanuel Feuermann; he was moved by it with the tears. He meets his god, takes lessons when that is possible, but he cannot allow himself to go to Vienna, Zurich or New York. He obtained its first price of the academy of Nice at 14 years, in 1934, and three years later left to study with the academy of Paris with Gerald Hekking.

Its fragile health made it reform for the Second world war. Refusing to play for the Germans, it engaged in the resistance. After the war, it made its beginnings with London with the Wigmore Hall on December 2nd, 1945, accompanied by Benjamin Britten in sonatas by Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy.

In December 1945, it created in Europe the first concerto for violoncello of Sergueï Prokofiev with London Philharmonic under the direction of Walter Susskind, and during three years exclusiveness keeps some. Later, Gendron will remember it while joking: " Thus I began my career: Nobody wanted to hear Maurice Gendron, but everyone wanted to hear Prokofiev! "

Its friendship with Britten will be the occasion of a painful disillusion: the type-setter gives up a project which it dedicated to Gendron after having found in Mstislav Rostropovitch his soul mate.

For its beginnings with New York, it chooses a homage to Emanuel Feuermann, deceased during the war, and interprets the concerto of Dvořák, and that in major D of Haydn.

It forms a trio with Yehudi Menuhin and Hepzibah Menuhin which will last 25 years.

In 1970, he became professor with the academy of Paris.

He is then victim of a serious car accident which meurtrit its shoulder, but in 1985 he is of return to London for a concert commemorating the fortieth birthday of its beginnings. He dies on August 20th, 1990.

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