Among the era's most skilled studio players, Felix Slatkin earned recognition through his violin work, his leadership of recordings that ranged from core symphonic repertoire to attractive transcriptions of lighter pieces, and his direction of a string quartet long regarded as among the era's strongest ensembles. Capitol Records ties supplied him and his wife, cellist Eleanor Aller of the Hollywood String Quartet, with the financial foundation needed to undertake concerts in fields that rarely paid their way. His 1963 death from a heart attack produced real distress throughout the Hollywood and Los Angeles studio-music community, where he had grown nearly indispensable.
Slatkin took up music instruction at age six in St. Louis under Sylvan Noack, spent a subsequent year with violinist Isadore Grossman, and at ten captured a scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music for violin study with Efrem Zimbalist plus conducting lessons with Fritz Reiner. Although he was building a favorable name as a soloist with leading orchestras, he chose at seventeen to enter the St. Louis Symphony, rising quickly to assistant principal and gathering a chamber group of young players. A 1935 competition victory brought a guest slot with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra as its top award and introduced him to his future spouse. After that Hollywood engagement he relocated to Los Angeles to work as a studio musician, securing the post of principal violinist with the 20th Century Fox Orchestra and thereby beginning a lifelong immersion in the Southern California music scene, already home to numerous leading composers and solo performers. In 1939 he married Eleanor Aller, who had recently become first cellist at Warner Brothers Studios; the couple soon assembled the Hollywood String Quartet by recruiting fellow studio players violinist Joachim Chassman and violist Paul Robyn.
Beginning in 1941, Slatkin led the Army Airforce Tactical Command Orchestra at Santa Ana Air Force Base, prompting Aller to remark, "There went the quartet!" Upon his discharge in 1945 he returned to the Fox concertmaster chair and the quartet reassembled, with assistant Fox concertmaster Paul C. Shure taking Chassman's place. In the years that followed the members labored steadily to establish themselves as America's leading string quartet and became the first such group to build its reputation principally through recordings. Those discs, spanning Beethoven to Schoenberg, have reappeared on the Testament label and substantiate every claim made for the ensemble's standing. The quartet's rich tone drew listeners outside the classical public; Frank Sinatra elected to record with the group and depended on Slatkin for musical guidance as well. For Capitol Records, Slatkin produced more than two dozen albums with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra and his own Concert Arts Orchestra, among them a Grammy-winning set of Offenbach's Gaîte Parisienne. On Liberty Records he supplied a dozen or more entries in the "Fantastic" series, among them Fantastic Strings, Fantastic Brass, and Fantastic Percussion of Felix Slatkin. His sons Leonard Slatkin, now a conductor of international rank, and Fred Zlotkin, performing under the family's original surname as a cellist, have likewise gained distinction.
