Maurice Hasson

Maurice Hasson died over the weekend of 7 and 8 November 2026, at the age of 92. His death was reported on 9 November 2026 by El Nacional in Caracas, by Norman Lebrecht's Slippedisc, which described him as an esteemed violinist and teacher, and by The Strad, which called him a distinguished Franco-Venezuelan violinist and pedagogue. The place and cause of death were not made public, and no funeral arrangements had been announced at the time of the reports.

Maurice Hasson was born in France on 6 July 1934. He studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Line Talluel and Joseph Calvet. There he won the First Prize for violin and the Grand Prix for chamber music, and he was awarded the Conservatoire's Prix d'Honneur, reportedly the first given in sixty years.

In 1953 he was a laureate of the Jacques Thibaud Violin Competition in Paris. At the competition he met the Polish born Mexican violinist Henryk Szeryng, who became his teacher for many years and an important influence on his playing and career.

In 1960 Hasson emigrated to Venezuela with his first wife, the pianist Monique Duphil, and their two daughters. Over thirteen years in Caracas he played in the first violin section of the Orquesta Sinfonica de Venezuela and became one of the central figures of the country's classical music scene. He made his solo debut with the orchestra on 19 November 1961 at the Teatro Municipal, playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto under Antonio Estevez, and appeared with it as a soloist 34 times between 1961 and 2004, under conductors including Inocente Carreno, Gonzalo Castellanos Yumar and Pedro Antonio Rios-Reyna. His final appearance with the orchestra, in July 2004, was Paganini's First Concerto conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Castellanos Yumar dedicated his violin concerto to Hasson.

Hasson moved to London in 1973 and made his debut at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, playing Paganini's Violin Concerto No. 1. In 1978 he made his United States debut with the Cleveland Orchestra under Lorin Maazel. He went on to perform with major orchestras in Europe, Israel and the United States under conductors including Colin Davis, Yehudi Menuhin, Kurt Masur, Eliahu Inbal, David Zinman, Simon Rattle and Andrew Davis.

In 1976 he recorded Bach's Concerto for Two Violins with his teacher Henryk Szeryng and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields directed by Neville Marriner. He played the 1727 'Benvenuti, Halphen' Stradivari violin, which he owned until 2005.

From 1986 to 2015 Hasson was professor of violin at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he taught generations of violinists, among them the Venezuelan violinist and conductor Giovanni Guzzo. In 2015, at the age of 80, he gave a farewell recital of French repertoire at Wigmore Hall with the pianist Tadashi Imai and retired from the concert platform.

Hasson's first marriage was to the French pianist Monique Duphil, with whom he had two daughters. He later married Janet Hoogesteijn and lived with her in London; they had two children, and he had five grandchildren. He held French and Venezuelan nationality. He was awarded the Medaille de Vermeil of the City of Paris, and he refused honours offered by the Venezuelan government.

Hasson's career linked the French violin tradition of the Paris Conservatoire, the teaching of Henryk Szeryng, the growth of orchestral music in Venezuela and three decades of violin teaching in London. His 1976 recording of the Bach Double Concerto with Szeryng and Marriner is still regarded as a classic, and the many students who passed through his studio at the Royal Academy of Music carried his teaching into orchestras and concert halls around the world.