Death of an American composer and amazing art collector
mainHenri Lazarof, who assembled a $100 million modern art collection and composed seven symphonies, has died in Los Angeles, aged 90.
He and wife Janice bequeathed the collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It contains works by Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky and more. Aside from symphonies, Lazarof wrote several concertos and 11 string quartets.
Bulgaian born, Lazarof served in the Israeli army and studied with Paul Ben Haim. He has been extensively recorded.
We heard a lot of his music in Seattle in the late 1980s, as Gerard Schwarz championed him for a while. Can’t say much of it appealed to me, but I appreciated the effort to give audiences something new. Well, he lived a long and interesting life.
How did a composer amass such a fortune?
I tried to listen to his Concerto for Orchestra (offered in the video above) and ask myself: what does this music ‘say’? What does it contribute to the world?
He was actually 81, not 90 – he was born in 1932.