Brenton James Langbein, AO (21 January 1928 – 6 June 1993) was an Australian violinist, conductor, and composer.
Life
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.
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.
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.
He also studied piano under Adele Wiebusch, who additionally supervised his daily music practice at school when he was a child.
He gave his first local public performance at the age of five-and-a-half and his first recital aged seven.
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.
At age nine he won a Eugene Alderman Scholarship for a further three years' tuition
at the Conservatorium, where he was taught by Ludwig Schwab, and began to perform with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra at age fourteen.
He attended Gawler High School and graduated from the University of Adelaide with a Bachelor of Music.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recognition and legacy
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.
In the 1986 Queen's Birthday Honours he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for service to music.
The Brenton Langbein Theatre, part of the Barossa Convention Centre in Tanunda, is named after him,
as is the Langbein String Quartet, run by the Firm, a South Australian contemporary music organisation.
Hans Werner Henze wrote a solo viola composition,
An Brenton, as a tribute to Langbein shortly after his death.
The Swiss composer Hermann Haller wrote his very last work,
Blätterfall..., written for the Kammermusiker Zürich, "to the memory of Brenton Langbein ".
His papers and other ephemera were donated to the Mortlock Library at the State Library of South Australia.
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.
