Earl Wild died this morning :(

[otterhouse]

94 years is a blessed age, but it made me a bit sad too...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8SOhPE6XsU&fmt=18

Rolf

[MN Dave]

Rest in peace.

[Brian]

Very sad news. Just the other day I was posting about how he had released two new CDs at age 88, and musing that it seemed like he would live forever.
Of course, in his recordings, he will.

[SonicMan46]

Just obtained my first Earl Wild recordings, Chopin Nocturnes, the other day; really enjoyed his playing and was about to research other offerings by this long-lived pianist.  His biography is fascinating and he was an important part of recording history for a long time - regret his passing!   

On weekends, we get the NY Times, so suspect there will be a long & thorough obit tomorrow - 

[Aeolian harp]

Sad news    Was he the last remaining survivor of the old generation of great pianists that were born pre-1920?

[listener]

I was fortunate  to have heard him in recital in London some years ago in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.   The audience was so hushed during his Chopin that at the end of one of the quieter preludes someone murmured "lovely" and it was almost like an explosion.
The program was quite long, and he ended it with Balakirev's Islamey!
His recordings of the Rachmaninoff concertos for Readers Digest with Horenstein were reissued on LP by Quintessence, and were very highly thought of.   I haven't seen CD copies.
Here are four discs from my collection.   His Gershwin record with Fiedler often made the top of recommendation lists.

[Wanderer]

That's very sad news. I have always cherished his recordings. May he rest in peace.

[Luke]

Playing through his Gershwin and Rachmaninov arrangements has been a great pianistic pleasure of mine in recent years, even though the Gershwin ones, particularly, are extremely hard. The Rachmaninov, OTOH, ought to be in the repertoire of any pianisit who wishes Rachmaninov had written more solo piano music, because they are wonderfully idiomatic and are, effectively, like so many more Rachmaninov preludes. I'm going to spin his recordings of them later on.

[Brian]

Here's a pretty staggering clip of Wild playing his transcription of the Rakoczy March, in 1951.

[MichaelRabin]

His recordings of the Rachmaninoff concertos for Readers Digest with Horenstein were reissued on LP by Quintessence, and were very highly thought of.   

These are on Chandos as well as Chesky. Magnificent accounts of the Rachmaninov PCs and the Rhapsody Op 43. I have the Chesky versions. MDT have the Chesky versions on their site.

[listener]

obit from the New York Times

Earl Wild, Pianist, Dies at 94

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By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: January 23, 2010

Earl Wild, an American pianist and composer who was renowned for his performances of the virtuoso showpieces of the grand Romantic tradition but whose enormous repertory included everything from Baroque works and Mozart concertos to contemporary scores, died Saturday at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 94.
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Steve J. Sherman/Associated Press

Earl Wild faces the audience at Carnegie Hall during a performance in 2005.
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His companion of 38 years, Michael Rolland Davis, confirmed the death.

Mr. Wild, with his shock of white hair and his high-energy performance style, could seem a flamboyant presence on the concert stage. But although he reveled in bravura works — splashy Liszt operatic transcriptions, for example, and concertos by Rachmaninoff — his performances consistently combined a deeply considered interpretive approach and an ironclad technique. Even into his 90s, his performances projected both power and musicality.

In a 1981 profile of Mr. Wild in The New York Times, the critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that Mr. Wild had been "in the forefront of the Romantic revival," and cited his championship of Liszt — at a time when Liszt was out of favor among many pianists — as one of Mr. Wild's most crucial contributions to modern pianism.

"By any standards," Mr. Schonberg wrote, "Mr. Wild has one of the great piano techniques of the 20th century, and with it a rich, sonorous tone."

Mr. Wild traced his musical lineage directly to the great pianists of the 19th century virtuoso tradition. Born in Pittsburgh on Nov. 26, 1915, he began picking out melodies at the piano when he was three, matching the pitches of the opera overtures his parents played on their phonograph.

He began his studies at four, and at 12 he began working with Selmar Jansen, a pianist who had studied with the composer-pianists Eugen d'Albert and Xaver Scharwenka, both of whom had studied with Liszt. Later, he studied with Paul Doguereau, who had been a student of Ignacy Paderewski and Egon Petri, who had studied with Ferruccio Busoni.

Mr. Wild began giving radio recitals in Pittsburgh when he was 12 and began playing the piano and celesta with the Pittsburgh Symphony at 14. At 15, he played Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 with Dimitri Mitropoulos and the Minneapolis Symphony.

As a music student at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), Mr. Wild studied several instruments in addition to the piano, including the cello, bass and flute. During World War II, he was a flutist in the United States Navy Band. He was also a frequent piano soloist with the Navy Orchestra, and during the war he gave recitals at the White House and toured the United States with the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, performing "The Star-Spangled Banner" before her speeches.

Mr. Wild was already a celebrity by the time he entered the Navy. In 1937, he joined the NBC network in New York as a staff pianist, and in 1939 he became the first pianist to give a televised recital. He also performed Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in a 1942 radio broadcast.

After leaving the Navy in 1944, Mr. Wild became a staff pianist, conductor and composer at ABC, a position he held until 1968. It was for ABC that he composed his large-scale Easter oratorio, "Revelations" (1962), to a libretto by William Lewis. Mr. Wild's other compositions include "The Turquoise Horse" (1976), a choral work, and the "Doo-Dah" Variations, on a theme by Stephen Foster (1992), for piano and orchestra.

During his years at ABC, Mr. Wild also toured regularly as a soloist. He gave the premieres of Paul Creston's Piano Concerto (1949) and Marvin David Levy's Piano Concerto No. 1 (1970). He collaborated with other soloists, including the violinists Mischa Elman and Oscar Shumsky, and many opera singers, including Maria Callas, Jennie Tourel, Robert Merrill, Mario Lanza, Jan Peerce and Zinka Milanov.

Mr. Wild recorded copiously, starting in 1939, when he accompanied the oboist Robert Bloom in a set of Handel sonatas for RCA. All told, his discography includes more than 35 concertos, 26 chamber music recordings and more than 700 solo piano scores, including highly regarded accounts of the major works of Liszt, Chopin and Rachmaninoff, as well as music by Beethoven, Brahms, Copland, Gershwin and Debussy, and several of his own works and arrangements.

Since 1997, his recordings — new performances as well as reissues of older discs — have been released on his own imprint, Ivory Classics. In 1997 he won a Grammy Award for "Earl Wild: The Romantic Master," with virtuoso transcriptions (including nine of his own) of works by Handel, Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns and other composers.

Mr. Wild taught at the Eastman School of Music, Penn State University, Ohio State University, Carnegie Mellon, the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School.

In 1986, he was awarded the Liszt Medal by the Hungarian government, in recognition of his long association with the composer's music. His last concert performance was at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on Feb. 5, 2008, when he was awarded the President's Merit Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

In recent years, Mr. Wild has been writing his memoirs, which are due to be published by Carnegie Mellon Press this year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/arts/music/24wild.html?partner=rss&emc=rss