Misha Dichter was born in 1945 in Shanghai, where his Polish parents had fled via the Trans-Siberian Railway to wait out the end of the war. In 1947, the Dichter family settled in Los Angeles, where Misha began studying the piano. His first important teacher was Aube Tzerko, who had studied with Artur Schnabel. “He literally made me start all over again,” Misha Dichter recalls. But the hard work eventually paid off when he was accepted into Rosina Lhévinne’s class at the Juilliard School. “In the fall of 1965, I saw a poster in the Juilliard cloakroom announcing the third annual Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow,” recalls Mr. Dichter. “I had just lost a few local competitions in Los Angeles, so I told myself I just had to go for the big competition.” The silver medal won by the young pianist in 1966 enabled him to sign a contract with RCA Victor, for whom he recorded the three acclaimed albums reissued here, and to launch the international career of this “most refined pianist” (High Fidelity). It was perhaps inevitable that Dichter’s first album for the label would be devoted to Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in B-flat minor, the very work that catapulted the competition’s first prizewinner, Van Cliburn, to international fame. Dichter was due to play the Tchaikovsky at Tanglewood, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf, and RCA arranged recording sessions. Dichter’s second album on RCA Victor juxtaposes Brahms piano pieces and the three movements of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and with his third album on RCA, the pianist turns to Beethoven and Schubert. Arthur Rubinstein approved of Dichter’s Schubert, so much so that he invited his young colleague to his Paris home, where a film crew shot Dichter playing Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat D 960 in Rubinstein’s presence. Dichter also has a special affinity for the Sonata in A major D 959 - “it always represents for me what heaven looks and sounds like.”