Misha Dichter - The Complete RCA Victor Recordings

Description

Misha Dichter was born in 1945 in Shanghai, where his Polish parents had taken refuge via the Trans-Siberian Railway to wait out 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 from scratch," 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," Mr. Dichter recalls. "I had just lost a few local competitions in Los Angeles, so I figured I might as well go for the big one." The silver medal won by the young pianist in 1966 earned him a contract with RCA Victor, for whom he recorded the three acclaimed albums reissued here, and launched 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 winner, Van Cliburn, to international fame. Dichter was 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 piano pieces by Brahms and the three movements of Stravinsky's Petrushka, and with his third album on RCA, the pianist devotes himself 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 captured Dichter playing Schubert's Sonata in B-flat D 960 in Rubinstein's presence. Dichter also has a particular affinity for the Sonata in A major D 959 — "it still represents for me what heaven looks and sounds like."