Malcolm Frager

Frager was a younger modern of Leon Fleischer (b. 1928), John Browning (b. 1933), and Vehicle Cliburn (b. 1934). Like them he became a significant prizewinner, you start with the Michaels Memorial Award in Chicago, accompanied by the Leventritt in 1959, and a yr later on the Queen Elisabeth Competition at Brussels. The Michaels award triggered a short dust-up when it became known that Frager was a member of family of the reward giver (whose memorialized parents have been killed inside a aircraft crash overseas), however the Leventritt and QEC validated the voting of Chicago judges. At age 14 Frager undertook six many years of research in N.Con.C. with Carl Friedberg, a pupil of Clara Schumann, and throughout that period was privately informed. He continued to Columbia College or university, majoring in Russian research and graduating in 1957. The Leventritt opened up doorways both in the U.S. and overseas; Frager produced his 1st concert tour in 1959. In 1963 he performed not merely in Central and SOUTH USA, however in the U.S.S.R. for the first (however, not last) period. In 1969, he added china and taiwan to his concert itinerary, and Australia in 1969. His specialties included Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann, however, not at the trouble of twentieth-century composers, Prokofiev and Bartók specifically. He spent time and effort searching for original variations of music, unearthing the Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1 that Nicolas Rubinstein got damned therefore brutally in 1875, as well as the 1841 Fantasie in A that later on became the first motion of Schumann’s just Piano Concerto. Frager became thinking about eighteenth-century fortepianos which he performed and documented Haydn and Mozart and had written scholarly content articles in his leisure time. Despite trips, recordings, and archival pursuits, Frager under no circumstances achieved parity along with his elder contemporaries, actually after Fleischer’s right-hand damage (an extreme type of carpal tunnel symptoms, in place, that also price Gary Graffman the usage of his right hands), and Cliburn’s digital retirement after ten years of worldwide successes. Along with his curly brownish hair, long throat, and prepared smile, Frager appeared to absence their demonic focus on stage (or, in Cliburn’s case, an obvious other-worldly communion with “voices”). His artistry was by no means matter-of-fact, but neither was it charismatic, and for that reason, best valued sight-unseen on broadcasts and recordings. His loss of life was untimely — from malignancy, among the music world’s best-kept secrets. He performed almost to the finish, including a Mozart concerto in Baltimore with conductor David Zinman simply weeks before his moving. To anyone, nevertheless, who experienced known Frager right away of his profession, he appeared stricken and performed mechanically — a courageous adieu, however, not musically unforgettable (as Dinu Lipatti’s have been in 1950), despite those 1st prizes and complete schedule.