Gieseking, Walter

Performer

Walter Gieseking (5 November 1895 – 26 October 1956) was a French-born German pianist and composer. Because of his gifts — he had a natural technique, perfect pitch, and an abnormally acute faculty for memorization — Gieseking was able to master unfamiliar repertoire, however difficult, with relatively little practice. From his early instruction in the Leimer method, he usually studied new pieces away from the piano. It became well-known to the public, for instance, that he often committed new works to memory while traveling by train, ship or plane. Sometimes, according to Harold C. Schonberg's book The Great Pianists (1963), he could even learn an entire concerto by heart in one day. Gieseking had a very wide repertoire, ranging from various pieces by Bach and the core works by Beethoven through to the concertos of Rachmaninoff (the composer himself was impressed with his interpretation of the Third)[citation needed] and more modern works by the likes of Busoni, Hindemith, Schoenberg and the lesser-known Italian Petrassi. He gave the premiere of Pfitzner's Piano Concerto in 1923. Today, though, he is particularly remembered as one of the greatest interpreters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the two French impressionist masters Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, virtually all of whose solo piano music he recorded on LP for EMI in the early 1950s (the Mozart and Debussy sets have recently been re-released on CD), after recording much of it with even greater youthful vitality for Columbia in the 1930s and 1940s, some of which have also been re-released on CD. [source from Wikipedia]

Work

Gieseking, Walter