Henri Temianka - Orange, CA - Statues of Historic Figures on Waymarking.com

The statue bust is about 1.5 to 2 feet tall and a few inches wide. It stands on a concrete pedestal with a plaque, acknowledging who the statue is as well as a quote. The statue seems to be made of bronze.


Taken from Wikipedia, "After a brilliant New York City debut in 1928, described by Olin Downes in The New York Times as “one of the finest accomplishments in years,” Temianka returned to Europe and rapidly established himself as one of the era’s foremost concert violinists. He made extensive concert tours through almost every country in Europe and appeared with major orchestras both in Europe and the U.S. under conductors including Pierre Monteux (who gave him his first Paris appearance), Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Adrian Boult, Fritz Reiner, Sir Henry J. Wood, George Szell, Otto Klemperer, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and William Steinberg. In Leningrad he was engaged for a single performance, but his virtuosity was so impressive that he was retained for five performances with five complete programs within a week.

In 1935 he won third prize in the first Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Warsaw, Poland; Ginette Neveu took first prize, and David Oistrakh second. (A short documentary about that historic event can be found at (visit link) In that year he also premiered a suite that the then-unknown Benjamin Britten had written for him and pianist Betty Humby, and performed music by Sergei Prokofiev, with the composer at the piano in Moscow; and Ralph Vaughan Williams conducted his violin concerto for him in London. In 1936 he founded the Temianka Chamber Orchestra in London. He was the concertmaster of the Scottish Orchestra from 1937 to 1938. He gave his first concert in Los Angeles, a violin recital, at the Wilshire Ebell in 1940. From 1941 to 1942 he was the concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony under Fritz Reiner, performing as soloist in concertos including the Beethoven and Mozart A major.

His appearances as violin soloist and guest conductor in Europe and both North and South America were interrupted by World War II, during which he became a senior editor in the U.S. Office of War Information. Because of his fluency in four languages (English, French, German and Dutch), he translated and edited sensitive documents. Through a combination of his bureaucratic connections there and contacts from his international performing career, and with assistance from HIAS, he was able to secure the release of his parents from the Nazi concentration camp in Gurs, France, in 1941. However, upon arriving in Spain, they were thrown in jail by Franco's police. Temianka recalled that a concert he had given in Madrid in 1935 had been attended by a powerful Spanish aristocrat and president of the Bilbao Philharmonic Society, Ignacio de Gortazar y Manso de Velasco, the 19th Count of Superunda (see also José Manso de Velasco, 1st Count of Superunda). The Count personally escorted Temianka’s parents from jail to his mansion, and then arranged for their passage by ship to Cuba and the United States, where they became citizens. Temianka described these remarkable events in a chapter of his second book Chance Encounters (not yet published); that chapter has been integrated with illustrations of many of the relevant photographs, letters and other documents, and privately printed as a monograph.

In 1945 he performed at Carnegie Hall with pianist Artur Balsam. In 1946 he performed all the Beethoven violin sonatas with pianist Leonard Shure at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Over the next 45 years he made appearances in more than 3,000 concerts in 30 countries, with some 500 concerts in the Los Angeles metropolitan area alone, appearing as violin soloist, conductor of the California Chamber Symphony, first violinist of the Paganini Quartet, and in remarkable chamber music recitals such as the Beethoven sonata cycles with pianists Lili Kraus, Leonard Pennario, Rudolf Firkušný and George Szell, and the Bach violin sonatas with Anthony Newman. He performed the Bach Double Violin Concerto with David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin, Henryk Szeryng and Jack Benny. His chamber groups performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles Music Center and the Mark Taper Forum. In 1960 he was the music director at the esteemed Ojai Music Festival. In the 1980s his California Chamber Virtuosi gave concerts at Pepperdine University and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.

As an avid chamber music player, Temianka hosted frequent private musical evenings in his Los Angeles home, playing with the likes of Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Joseph Szigeti, David Oistrakh, Henryk Szeryng, Leonard Pennario, William Primrose, Gregor Piatigorsky, Jean-Pierre Rampal and other luminaries. Temianka was equally adept on the viola as the violin, and sometimes played it during these evenings, as well as in concert in 1962 with Isaac Stern in a performance of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante (which he also performed on violin with William Primrose on viola).

In 1980 the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians said of Temianka that he was "...known for his flawless mastery of his instrument, a pure and expressive tone, and forceful yet elegant interpretations." On July 28, 2016 Jim Svejda at Classical KUSC FM radio aired a four-hour program of recordings by Temianka, the Paganini Quartet and the California Chamber Symphony."

URL of the statue: Not listed

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Date Logged Log User Rating   12/22/2017 bluesnote visited it