When Shlomo Margaliot was 15 years old, his mother sewed a stack of Reichsmarks into his shirt and sent him on the most important errand of his young life: He was to purchase four tickets for a ship to Palestine, where the family planned to escape from Nazi Germany. But when Margaliot reached the ticket…
(JTA) — The celebrated pianist Mikhail Klein collapsed and died on stage at the age of 72 while performing his own composition in his hometown of Irkutsk. Klein, who in 1987 was awarded the prestigious title of Honored Artist of Russia, died at the foot of a grand piano of the Irkutsk Philharmonic Orchestra on…
At age 18, David Lindenbaum finds himself suspended in between two universes that pull him in what he senses as opposite directions. On one side, there is his faith — a fervent Jew, Lindenbaum always wears a kippah (“Even while I’m sleeping,” he says with pride) and tries to maintain his religious identity also when…
This is a piano tale. It’s a story about coincidences, Jewish connections and post-Holocaust fallout. I have a piano. It’s unusual because of its construction, but mostly because of its history. It was built by the Bechstein company circa 1908 in Germany. It is a rehearsal piano — an upright with extra long strings and…
Walter Hautzig’s path out of Nazi-occupied Austria began with a piano his grandfather purchased for his mother, his daughter explained at his funeral this past Thursday. If his mother decided to go with the other option he had given her for a gift — a fur coat — things might have turned out very differently….
“It’s almost my birthday!” Irving Fields announces, no sooner have I arrived at the doorstep of his Midtown apartment. He gleefully declares that he will be turning “100 years young” in a couple of weeks and then promptly invites us to his birthday party. And so begins my afternoon with Fields, a pianist who has…
Claude Frank, who died on December 27 at age 89, was one of the last surviving pupils of the legendary Austrian Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel. In a reprint from Music & Arts of Frank’s set of complete Beethoven sonatas, originally released in 1970 for the composer’s bicentenary, the music is allowed to speak directly and…
Stuck in his spartan Brooklyn studio on a warm November day, pianist and composer Vadim Neselovskyi seemed a little restless. He had just returned from a six-city tour of Russia and his native Ukraine — a tour on which he and his musical partner, the noted horn player Arkady Shilkloper, packed houses from Moscow to…
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