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Gabriel Banat or Gabor Banat (September 23, 1926 - July 23, 2016) was Romanian born American classical violinist, conductor and musicologist.

He grew up in a Jewish and German speaking family in Timisoara (Transylvania). In 1942 the family moved to Budapest and was trained at Franz Liszt Academy of Music as a concert violinist after being heard by Bela Bartok. In 1944 he became a protege of Georges Enescu with whom he later toured in the US.

In 1946 Banat, likely an alias as his last name was Hirsch, came to the U.S. after WWII and cooperated with Nathan Milstein. Performing since the age of twelve as a soloist on several continents, Banat taught violin at Smith College. He conducted the Westchester Conservatory Orchestra and other ensembles near his home town Dobbs Ferry. In 1970 he joined the New York Philharmonic, then under Pierre Boulez. A passion for original sources resulted in his discovery (in Poland) of the holographs of Mozart's violin concertos missing from Berlin since 1941, which he then published in facsimile (Raven Press 1986). Earlier, he compiled an edited Masters of the Violin, a six-volume collection of works by lesser seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers (Johnson Reprint, 1981). The third volume of that series was devoted to the violin concertos of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, one of which Banat premiered in New York and Tokyo. A 1990 monograph on that composer in Black Music Research Journal, and the Saint-Georges entry in the New Grove, 2000, and in the Dictionary of Black Composers, led to a book.

Banat owned and performed on two violins by Stradivarius: The 1682 “ex-Hill,” now called the “Banat” and the “Pingrillé” dated 1713. He retired in 1993. At the end of his life he lived in Begur, Catalonia where he died.