Richard D. Colburn, 92; Major Benefactor of the Musical Arts in L.A.

Richard D. Colburn, a wealthy businessman whose own dreams of being a professional musician fueled his generous and lifelong commitment to music and music education, died Thursday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 92.

“He’d been very tired the last few days,” said his daughter, Carol Colburn Hogel. “But, still, this was unexpected.”

An amateur viola player for most of his life, Colburn was the major financer of the Colburn School of Performing Arts in downtown Los Angeles, a $26-million facility on Grand Avenue designed to educate youngsters in music and dance.

He also was a lifetime director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and benefactor of the annual Colburn Celebrity Recitals, a co-founder of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and a generous supporter of LACO, the Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Opera as well as numerous other musical organizations in Los Angeles and around the world.

In addition, he lent to budding musicians many fine instruments he had collected over half a century.

His enormous wealth and love of music also enabled Colburn to become one of the world’s great listeners, attending the best the world had to offer of symphony, chamber, opera and other musical events, including Milan’s La Scala, the Salzburg Festival and the London Symphony. And he oversaw so many musical salons at his own Beverly Hills estate that his closest friends could not even begin to sort them out.

“It’s difficult to think of anyone who has done more for more musicians,” Jeffrey Kahane, music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, said of Colburn. Besides gifts to Kahane’s own group and many other musical organizations, Kahane said, “The Colburn school is a tremendous and enduring gift to musicians.”

The school, which offers after-school and weekend programs, has 1,300 students from 2 1/2 to 18 years old. It also provides community outreach programs to elementary schools.

Recently, it began offering postsecondary degrees in music and plans an $80-million building addition to help support the degree program and provide expanded academic, rehearsal and library space.

Colburn once said he hoped that the Colburn school and conservatory “could become L.A.’s Juilliard,” a reference to the famed arts school in New York City.

Ernest Fleischmann, who for 29 years was managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, said Colburn had “probably put more money into classical music than any other single Californian. He’s just been extremely generous when it comes to music.”

Despite his largess, Colburn for most of his life maintained a low profile in Los Angeles and elsewhere. He would quote his father telling him as a boy: “Fools’ names and fools’ faces often appear in public places.”

It was only after Toby Mayman, longtime president of the Colburn school, prevailed upon him to come out from behind his curtain of anonymity that his name surfaced in any but the most exclusive music circles.

“I said you have to take credit for what you’ve done,” Mayman, who is now retired, told The Times of her ultimately successful effort to get Colburn to name the performing arts school after himself.

“His reticence or shyness about having his name in public, in light of what he had done for the city of Los Angeles, seemed to me absurd.”

In recent years, in connection with the school that now bears his name, Colburn occasionally agreed to a press interview. In one with The Times’ Elaine Dutka in 1998, he said that as a child he had been “the victim of poor training” in music and still had not overcome the bad habits he had learned then.

Acting on the belief that “well begun is half done,’” he said he began to realize that music education was expensive because it required one-on-one teaching. And he saw that, while there were some outstanding institutions catering to the best of the talent emerging in the later teen years, there were few places for young children during what he considered the more important formative years.

“By providing it to students who couldn’t otherwise afford it,” he told Dutka, “I hope they avoid the misfortune I had.” He added, with what Dutka reported as a “twinkle,” that if he had had better instruction, he could have “out-Heifetzed Heifetz.”

But, although he was a good musician, he would have been the first to admit that he was an amateur compared to most of his musical companions, which at various times included cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Isaac Stern and flutist James Galway.

Most who knew him, however, were only too happy to play with this particular amateur.

“Because of his love for live music and his willingness to put his money where his mouth was, he earned the love of some of the greatest musicians of his time,” said Stuart Canin, concertmaster of the Los Angeles Opera.

At Colburn’s invitation, musicians would come to his home in Beverly Hills -- or even spend the month of June with him at his London home or at some posh place he rented somewhere in Europe -- just to play chamber music. Until the last several years, following an injury to a finger of his left hand (his fingering hand), Colburn would play the viola.

Among those invited to “quartet month” many times, the “fortunate few,” as Colburn called them, was Daniel Rothmuller, associate principal cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“It was a sacred thing to him,” Rothmuller said. “We used to be able to, in the entire 30 days, get through all the Beethoven [string] quartets. All 16!” Plus other music as well.

They called themselves the Chester Square Quartet, although Rothmuller said that Colburn sometimes referred to them as the “pro-con quartet” -- “He would say three of us were pros and he was a con artist.” But, Rothmuller said, Colburn “would carry his weight.”

More often, Colburn would bring musicians to his Beverly Hills estate, where they would play, sometimes without an audience or with only a small group of friends. On other occasions, there would be performances in his music room, which was larger than many a public venue and lush with what Times’ writer Ann Conway described in her “Social Climes” column as “muted Flemish tapestry, blue and white porcelain collection and Hearstian-scaled fireplace.” The fireplace had, in fact, once been owned by publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst.

Also in the music room was an array of some of the more than 70 fine musical instruments in Colburn’s collection, most of which were out on loan at any given time to musicians.

Colburn told Conway that his commitment to share the instruments stemmed from an encounter he had in his teens with a collector of rare violins. He said he became infuriated when the man held out a Stradivarius to him but pulled it back when Colburn reached to touch it.

“I thought he was handing it to me to hold and set a bow to,” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘Stradivari didn’t make that instrument to be locked up in a cabinet.’ ”

Colburn also opened his music room for others to perform. And many of the important figures in the music world, including Kirov Opera conductor Valery Gergiev, Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and Canin, also have stayed at the Colburn estate as guests.

“I have lovely accommodations here,” Canin said in November 2003 during his stay at the Colburns while working with the L.A. Opera and away from his home in San Francisco.

Colburn was born June 24, 1911, in Carpentersville, Ill., but grew up on a San Diego farm. In 1933, he dropped out short of a degree from Antioch College near Dayton, Ohio. In his 20s, he worked as an accountant and then became an investment banker. He later moved into wholesaling and distributing construction equipment.

After returning to California in 1965, Colburn helped rescue the Denver-based Susquehanna Corp., a conglomerate dealing in building materials and uranium mining. At age 65, he started U.S. Rentals, a construction equipment rental firm.

Little else is known about Colburn’s business life. On how he acquired his vast fortune, Colburn would say only this to the New York Times in 1980: “I never created anything. I identified dogs and I got people to run them.” He once expanded that to say he bought cheap and sold dear.

Whatever the case, he made a lot of money and committed a good portion of it to music.

According to those who knew him, the person who was a major influence on Colburn to use his wealth for music education was Herbert Zipper, a Viennese conductor who had survived Nazi concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald and, after World War II, moved to the United States. Colburn met Zipper when both were living in the Chicago area and Zipper was conducting in-school concerts and teaching music to young people.

“Herbert had this enduring belief in the humanizing effect of music and all the arts and he early on established this bond with Dick Colburn,” former Colburn school president Mayman said. “Herbert’s thinking had an enormous impact on what Dick did in the world in terms of young people.”

Zipper moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s and joined the faculty of USC’s School of the Performing Arts, which was housed in a World War II-era barracks on a campus parking lot. When the school was threatened with extinction, Colburn began providing funding. The school was housed in an office warehouse for 18 years before the 35,000-square-foot building next door to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue was built.

The facility, which now is independent of USC, includes a concert hall named after Zipper and a home studio once used by the late violinist Jascha Heifetz that was rebuilt on the site and is used for classes.

That Colburn’s love of music fueled his commitment to the school is doubted by no one who knew him.

Los Angeles Philharmonic President Deborah Borda said she believed that Colburn’s love of music was “a truly spiritual force, a powerful force in his life.”

“If you asked Richard Colburn what is his higher power, I think he would say ‘music,’ ” she said.

But Colburn also had an irrepressible sense of humor and his share of quirks. For one, he insisted that those around him speak good English -- saying “you know” around him could get you fined a dollar. He would protest whenever someone used “million” when they meant something less, or if they said they would “kill” for a glass of wine.

“He’d say, ‘No you wouldn’t,’ ” Canin said. “I always accused him of not being poetic. But it was because he was a businessman. He believed in the function of language.”

Talking in November 2003 of that aspect of Colburn’s personality, Kahane laughed and noted that Colburn was a man who had “little tolerance for sloppiness of any kind.”

“He is a man of immense intellect and wit and charm and he would be the first one to acknowledge that he is someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” Kahane said.

That Colburn’s wealth and generosity had also earned him the right to be an eccentric also was clear. For one thing, he was married 10 times to nine women and was the father of eight children by various marriages.

“I wouldn’t marry a woman who hadn’t proved her fertility,” he quipped to The Times’ Dutka in an interview that was conducted even as people were still gathered in his home for one of his many wedding receptions.

At his death, he was married to Lisa Kirk Colburn, a film producer 43 years his junior.

Friends could only chuckle at this aspect of Colburn’s life. One, who said he had met “the last six wives,” said Colburn’s marital history was something between Colburn and his psychiatrist, “but, of course, he doesn’t have one.” Another said, “I’d say that is an optimist -- a man who marries that many times.”

Colburn made no effort to explain himself, other than to say, “I agree with life and life agrees with me.”

Besides his wife and daughter Carol, he is survived by his other children: Richard Whiting Colburn, Keith Whiting Colburn, Christine Isabel Colburn, David Dunton Colburn, McKee Dunton Colburn, Daisy Dunton Colburn and Franklin Anthony Colburn; seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

A memorial concert is being planned.