Ronan Lefkowitz

Ronan Lefkowitz is an instructor of violin at the Conservatory. He joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1976. He was born in Oxford, England, and is a graduate of Brookline High School and Harvard University. His most notable teachers include Gerald Gelbloom, Max Rostal, Louise Vosgerchian, Joseph Silverstein, and Szymon Goldberg. While in high school, Lefkowitz was concertmaster of and a frequent soloist with the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra. He was also concertmaster of the International Youth Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. In 1972, Lefkowitz won the Gingold-Silverstein Prize at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he now coaches chamber music. In 1984, he helped to establish and endow the Gerald Gelbloom Memorial Fellowship for a violin student each summer at the Tanglewood Music Center.

That same year, Lefkowitz was featured on the PBS television program Evening at Pops as a soloist with three of his Boston Symphony colleagues in a performance of Vivaldi's Concerto for Four Violins. In 1986, he joined the contemporary music ensemble Collage New Music. That summer, he performed the American premiere of Witold Lutoslawski's Chain 2, Dialogue for Violin and Orchestra as part of the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, leading to performances of the piece in its Boston Symphony premiere under the composer's direction in October 1990. In the spring of 1988, Lefkowitz was one of five Boston Symphony members, all Greater Boston Youth Symphony alumni, to take part as soloists in the world premiere of Peter Lieberson's Gesar Legend, which was composed for the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Recent concert engagements have included two performances with Yo-Yo Ma—a benefit at Harvard for Phillips Brooks House and a Tanglewood performance of Ives's Piano Trio with pianist Gilbert Kalish. Most recently, Lefkowitz has been involved with the Terezín Chamber Music Foundation, directed by BSO colleague Mark Ludwig, which seeks to find, perform, and record music written in the early 1940s by such composers as Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullmann, and Pavel Haas during their internment at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In addition, he has recently recorded two CDs of chamber music by Arthur Foote and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor for Koch International with Harold Wright, Virginia Eskin, and the Hawthorne String Quartet, of which he is first violin.