Gary Graffman: Complete Rca And Columbia

Sony Classical celebrates Gary Graffman – American pianist, teacher of piano and music administrator – with the first-ever release of Graffman’s complete recordings in a 24 CDs limited original jacket collection. When RCA Red Seal released the first Graffman recordings in 1956 – Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy and Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 2 & 3 – the pianist was 28 years old. Now, after more than 50 years, this debut recording is being released for the first time on CD, together with 13 more LPs worth of music, all newly remastered from the original analogue tapes. Graffman was born in New York City on October 14, 1928. Having started piano studies aged 3, Graffman entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 1936 when he was seven as a piano student of Isabelle Vengerova. After graduating from Curtis in 1946, he made his debut with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1949, Graffman won the prestigious Leventritt Competition. He went on to further his piano studies with Rudolf Serkin at the Marlboro Music Festival and informally with Vladimir Horowitz. Over the next three decades, Graffman toured extensively, both performing solo recitals and with orchestras around the globe. His recordings have often focussed on the Russian repertoire which is part of his family background. In the late 1970s an injury gradually forced Graffman to stop using his right hand to play but this encouraged him to pursue other interests such as writing, photography, and Oriental art. In 1980 he joined the faculty at the Curtis Institute and took over as the school’s director in 1986 and later President from 1995–2006. He continues on the faculty at Curtis teaching piano. For his service to music Graffman has received doctoral degrees, was honoured by the cities of Philadelphia and New York, and received the Governor’s Arts Award from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In addition to his administrative responsibilities, Graffman remains active as a teacher and coach of piano and chamber music. His notable students include the piano virtuosos Lang Lang, Yuja Wang, and Haochen Zhang. His 1982 autobiography is entitled I Really Should be Practicing. As a performer, seven left-hand works have been commissioned especially for him, including Ned Rorem’s Piano Concerto No. 4, Daron Hagen’s concerto Seven Last Words and, in Baltimore in April 1996, William Bolcom’s Gaea, a concerto for two pianos left hand, written for Graffman and his colleague Leon Fleisher. Included in Gary Graffman – The Complete Album Collection are notable performances of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1964 with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic), Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto (1966 with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra), Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Prokofiev Piano Sonatas and one of the first recordings in the West of Tchaikovsky’s Second and Third Piano Concertos (with Ormandy). His solo recital repertoire is represented by a generous selection of Brahms (including the Paganini Variations), Chopin, Liszt and Schumann (Carnaval and the Symphonic Etudes). There is also a reissue of what may be Graffman’s most widely heard recorded performance – George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue from the soundtrack of the 1979 Woody Allen movie Manhattan.