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The German violinist and music pedagogue, Edith Peinemann, was born in Mainz, Germany, the daughter of a Mainz orchestra's concert-master, with whom she learned violin until the age of 14. She went on to a relatively low-key conservatory education (with Heinz Stanske; then with Max Rostal at London’s Guildhall School). She would fulfill the "prophecy of violinist Yehudi Menuhin who, upon hearing her play when she was 19, predicted a 'brilliant and successful career'." In 1956, she won the first prize in the ARD International Music Competition in Munich.
At that competition, conductor William Steinberg, who was among the judges, invited her to make her American debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conducted by Max Rudolf, which she did in 1962. Word spread among Germany's conductors, such as Max Rudolf, about her achievements in the USA, including her Cleveland debut where she played Dvorak's Violin Concerto. Reviews of that concert were positive, with Carl Apone noting that Dvořák's concerto was "a proving ground on which to separate the men from the boys:"
Hungarian-born American conductor and composer George Szell saw her perform in Cleveland, invited her to perform with him at the De Doelen in Rotterdam in 1963, the Berliner Philharmoniker, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and often gave her coaching before concerts. She began to call him "Uncle George," as they developed a close friendship during that period. George Szell made a special attempt to obtain private funds from wealthy donors to buy her a violin of finer quality, which he helped her select. She has performed with dozens of orchestras and renowned conductors and toured worldwide, also appearing frequently at major music festivals. She performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the start of their new year in 1966, and with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in January, with Robert Mann conducting.
In 1967, after working with George Szell to perfect a performance of Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2 along with L.v. Beethoven's concerto, he asked Edith Peinemann to perform W.A. Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3, as W.A. Mozart, notes historian Michael Charry, was "a composer he reserved for his favorite and most mature artists. Amongst her numerous engagements, touring Southern Africa was a favourite. She was acclaimed and especially popular there, and did concert tours of that region five times (1964, 1969, 1974, 1975, 1978).
Edith Peinemann has continued her career over the following decades, becoming a professor of music at Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts from 1976, and is listed among their notable teachers, having taught other notable violinists, including Yaakov Rubinstein. She performed as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra in July 1987. Some of her other students have included Veronica Kröner, and Harriet Vorona.
Music professor Dr. David C. F. Wright, in an article acknowledging her contributions, notes that Edith Peinemann made her American debut at Carnegie Hall in 1965. In later years, she gave master-classes at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Indiana University at Bloomington, Kusatsu Festival in Japan and the Lucerne Conservatory. In 2005, she was the international president of the European String Teachers Association (ESTA).
Edith Peinemann’s discography is somewhat restricted, which is regrettable given the strength of her contribution in the large-scale works she favours. In particular, the rarely-recorded and fiendishly difficult Max Reger's Concerto (her 1990 recording is still one of only a handful, Kulenkampff’s 1944 broadcast perhaps being the best-known) is notable for its varied shapes and tones - from moments of great delicacy to the rich, broad tone in the post-Romantic slow movement of this vast work. Perhaps her least successful recording is that of Swedish Mozart-contemporary Joseph Kraus’s C major Concerto (1991), which lacks lightness and suffers a surfeit of emphasis; Peinemann’s phrasing is simply too hefty for the elegant classical discourse. This said, her claim to uphold the German tradition of Joachim and Flesch (a rather generalised aspiration, given the fact that they were in many ways aesthetically opposed to each other) is made credible by the declamatory power of her playing in the right repertoire. Thus, the 1976 Alban Berg's Violin Concerto ("To the memory of an angel") recording, which takes a distinctly Romantic rather than modernist stance, is from the very beginning a performance of strongly-marked gestures. Peinemann’s tone is characteristically generous, with a very significant width of vibrato, but also some portamenti; the second movement opens extraordinarily powerfully and the darker emotions in this playing cannot fail to seize and hold attention. Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto in D from 1983 is not dissimilar. This, too, is powerful and well-articulated, with effective accents in the lower half of the bow giving the work a purpose and direction that is consistently forceful. She had first played this work with Günter Wand at his 1963 début with the NDR broadcasting corporation in Hamburg, gaining critical admiration for her technique in both fingering and bowing. Similar traits are to be found again in Dvořák’s Concerto; this work is often rendered in a disappointingly disparate or long-winded manner, but Peinemann, ably backed by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in 1965, produces a beautifully balanced performance with a well-judged mixture of gravitas and delicacy.
Edith Peinemann is considered one of the world's "finest violinists of her time." In terms of recognition, she is one of an elite group of violinists to have been honoured by the award of the coveted Plaquette Eugène Ysaÿe (David Oistrakh, Leonid Kogan and Arthur Grumiaux being the only other previous recipients); as for her playing, it is her utter commitment in performance and the resulting depth and strength of sound that make her a great violinist, particularly in big post-Romantic and 20th-century repertoire. Her performances testify to an exceptionally strong-minded talent and, dare one say, a refreshingly assertive female sound on the violin - a view first articulated by conductor William Steinberg, who famously referred to her as ‘Milstein in skirts’! |
