As both soloist and chamber musician, the violinist György Pauk, who has died aged 88, was held in high respect for the refined quality of his tone and consummate musicianship.
Hungarian by birth and training, he settled in the UK in 1961, at the suggestion of Yehudi Menuhin. The 1960s and 70s in London were described by Pauk as “a golden age for classical music”, with leading international artists of the calibre of Daniel Barenboim and Radu Lupu prominent there, and Pauk was delighted to find himself among them. He was soon in high demand, playing as soloist with three London orchestras: the London Philharmonic, with whom he recorded the Tchaikovsky concerto, the London Symphony, who invited him to be leader (a position he declined), and the London Mozart Players.
He championed new works by composers including Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Alfred Schnittke and Peter Maxwell Davies; his recording of Michael Tippett’s Triple Concerto with Nobuko Imai and Ralph Kirshbaum won a Gramophone award in 1983.
But first and foremost he was a distinguished interpreter of his compatriot Béla Bartók, generally seeking out the music’s more intimate, classical sensibilities and the naivety of folk elements, in preference to its modernist angularities. In other repertoire too his playing was notable for its poise, poetic sensibility and a lyrical serenity engendered by his spontaneity of phrasing and an expressive deployment of vibrato.
Underpinning those qualities was an integrity and a humanity that invariably informed his musicianship. The singing quality of Pauk’s tone was undoubtedly enhanced by the 1714 “Massart” Stradivarius he played for most of his career. In October 2024 he loaned it to one of his pupils, Júlia Pusker.
He described himself as “one of the last descendants of the great Hungarian school”, tracing his pedagogical lineage back to Jenő Hubay, regarded as the school’s founder, and ultimately Joseph Joachim. Pauk himself was a pupil of Ede Zathureczky, a pupil and later assistant of Hubay, and through him came to prize the “quality, beauty and purity of the sound” that he considered the distinctive qualities of the Hungarian school. Other formative influences of the period were David Oïstrakh and Christian Ferras.
Having won three international competitions – the Paganini, jointly with Gérard Poulet (1956), the ARD (Munich Sonata) competition (1957) and the Marguerite Long–Jacques Thibaud (1959) – he came to the attention of Menuhin. The latter wrote a letter of recommendation to the Home Office to say that Pauk would be a student of his. Initially given permission to come to the UK for three months, he was in due course allowed to stay permanently.
He made his London orchestral debut in December 1961 with the LSO under Lorin Maazel and in the US with the Chicago Symphony at the invitation of Georg Solti. He subsequently performed with most of the major orchestras under leading conductors such as Bernard Haitink, Pierre Boulez, Charles Dutoit, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Christoph von Dohnányi. He broadcast regularly for the BBC and was a frequent visitor to the BBC Proms.
As a chamber musician he was a member of an acclaimed trio with the cellist Kirshbaum and the pianist Peter Frankl. With the latter he had played since student days: they studied jointly under Leó Weiner and it was in collaboration with Frankl that he won the ARD competition. The trio’s first performance was a concert at the 1973 Edinburgh festival that was broadcast live. The BBC forthwith engaged them to play frequently, and in due course commissioned Fourteen Little Pictures by James MacMillan to mark the 25th anniversary of the trio. The work was first performed by them on 21 May 1997 at the Wigmore Hall, London.
Born in Budapest into a Jewish family, György was the son of Magda, a pianist who encouraged his musical studies, and Imre Pauk, a businessman who died in a labour camp following the Nazi occupation of Hungary in April 1944. Magda was murdered following a raid later that year by Hungarian fascists belonging to the Arrow Cross party. With his grandmother, aunt and cousin György managed to escape, though they were subsequently brought to the Budapest ghetto, where they survived until the liberation by the Russians.
He began playing the violin at the age of five and at 13 was admitted to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he studied with Weiner and Zoltán Kodály in addition to Zathureczky.
Leaving Hungary in 1956, he lived initially in Paris, deciding in 1958 not to return home. He then moved to the Netherlands, where he was leader of the Brabant Orchestra in ’s-Hertogenbosch, and it was also there that he met Susanne Mautner, a Hungarian working in the brewing industry, whom he married in 1959, before moving to the UK. He was given British citizenship in 1967, and was able to visit his family in Hungary, but it was not until 1973 that he returned to the concert platform there.
In 1987 he became a professor of violin at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and also gave masterclasses at the International Menuhin Music Academy in Switzerland and in Los Angeles, San Francisco and at Oberlin College and the Juilliard School in New York.
He retired from the concert platform in 2007, giving his farewell concert in Budapest with the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Iván Fischer.
Susanne and their son and daughter survive him.
• György Pauk, violinist, born 26 October 1936; died 18 November 2024
