The best musicians in Hollywood

From a Wall Street Journal article by Terry Teachout:

The major studios employed in-house orchestras to record the scores for the films they released, and the players were highly trained, well-paid top-tier musicians who took their anonymous studio work seriously. Nevertheless, many of these artists continued to perform classical music on the side, and four of the finest of them started giving concerts in 1947 and, later, making records.

Unashamed of their unprestigious day jobs, they instead flaunted them by dubbing themselves the Hollywood String Quartet, and within a few years the HSQ was widely regarded as one of America’s top chamber-music groups. The HSQ was led by Felix Slatkin, the concertmaster of the Twentieth Century Fox orchestra, whose first-chair cellist, Eleanor Aller Slatkin, was Felix’s wife and a charter member of the quartet. The other members, Paul Shure and Paul Robyn, who was later replaced by Alvin Dinkin, were also Hollywood studio musicians. The group was noteworthy for many reasons, starting with the fact that all of its players were born and trained in America….

Read on here.