Lynn Blakeslee was born in Los Angeles, and began violin studies at the age of four. Her teachers and mentors read as a stellar history of violin performance and pedagogy: Sascha Jacobsen (a student of Franz Kneisel), Efrem Zimbalist (Leopold Auer), Ricardo Odnoposoff (Karl Flesch), Franz Samobyl, and Sandor Vegh (Jenö Hubay).
She received her Bachelor of Music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music. A Fulbright grant took her to Vienna, where she earned a Concert Diploma with Distinction from the Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst. She received a Martha Baird Rockefeller Grant, and performed in London, Vienna, Munich, and Berlin. During the Cold War, the U.S. State Department presented her in recitals in Budapest and Bucharest.
A member of Die Wiener Solisten for many years, she was also concertmaster at Theater an der Wien, a member of the Wiener Kontrapunkte, and of the Deutsche Bach Solisten. She was a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Wiener Ton-Künstler, and the Wiener Kammerorchester. She attended Sandor Vegh’s International Musicians Seminar at Prussia Cove in its early years (1970 and 1971). While heading Chamber Music at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, she was also concertmaster of the chamber orchestra, Cis.
Lynn Blakeslee’s honors included a prize at the International Musikwettbewerb, Vienna, and the Philadelphia Orchestra Award. For 15 years, Blakeslee was first violinist of the Streichquintett Mozarteum, and together with members of this ensemble, she ran a summer chamber music festival and violin workshop at Schloss Raabs in Austria.
Her teaching credits included the Mozarteum in Salzburg and its Summer Akademie, the Bruckner Konservatorium in Linz, Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, the Euro Music Academy Leipzig (Germany), the Casals Festival in Prades (France), the Sulzach-Rosenberg International Music Festival, and master classes at the Papageno School in Villarica, Chile.
Professor Blakeslee joined the Eastman faculty in 1987. She retired in the spring of 2013 and died in Austria in August 2015, while teaching Schloss Raabs.
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