阿列克斯·怀森伯格
钢琴
Alexis Weissenberg, whose technical abilities seemed to know no bounds, was one of Herbert von Karajan’s favourite pianists. Their close artistic collaboration began in 1967 with Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. This was followed by performances of Bach, Rachmaninov, Franck, and Brahms. Karajan’s only recording of Beethoven’s complete piano concertos was made in 1977 with Alexis Weissenberg and the Berliner Philharmoniker. Two years later, the two gave their last concert together as part of an evening held at the Philharmonie Berlin in honour of the then German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
Alexis Weissenberg was born in Sofia in 1929 to Jewish parents and began taking piano lessons at the age of four from his mother, who trained in Vienna. In 1937, he began studying piano and composition under Pancho Vladigerov. At the age of ten, Weissenberg gave his first concert. The family fled to Palestine via Istanbul and Beirut in 1943, having been imprisoned due to rampant anti-Semitism in German-occupied Bulgaria. Weissenberg then studied in Jerusalem under Alfred Schröder, a former assistant to Artur Schnabel, and made his debut as a soloist with the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra in 1945. He moved to New York in 1946 to continue his piano studies at the Juilliard School under Olga Samaroff. He made successful orchestral debuts in Philadelphia (1947) and New York (1948) and toured Central and South America, Western Europe, the Middle East and the United States with conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy and Georges Szell. In 1956, Weissenberg withdrew from concert performances for a while, became a French citizen, and recorded Stravinsky’s Trois Mouvements de Pétrouchka, among other works. His subsequent experimental music film Pétrouchka delighted Herbert von Karajan, who immediately engaged Weissenberg for concerts and joint film projects. In 1966, the pianist made his comeback with a performance in Paris, after which he appeared in New York, Berlin, Salzburg and Japan, among other places. In his final years, Weissenberg no longer performed due to illness, but he continued to teach – in 2007, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the National Academy of Music “Prof. Pancho Vladigerov”, in Sofia. Weissenberg died in Lugano in 2012.
