Among the first Soviet musicians allowed to travel in the West, Emil Gilels s American debut on October 3, 1955, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra caused a sensation. Later that month, Gilels recorded his best-selling collaboration with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikovsky s First Piano Concerto. Subsequent American tours between 1958 and 1965 yielded a small yet select group of recordings for the two leading American classical labels, RCA and Columbia, including the Brahms Second Concerto with Reiner/Chicago, and the Chopin First Concerto with Ormandy/Philadelphia. Among Gilels Bach, Liszt, Schubert and Shostakovich solo recordings for RCA, the Schubert A minor Sonata, D 784, is being released for the first time on CD. In 1979 Gilels returned to the Tchaikovsky Concerto with the New York Philharmonic and its music director Zubin Mehta for a televised Pension Fund Benefit Concert, subsequently issued as one of the first CBS digitally recorded releases. Born in Odessa on October 19, 1916, Emil Gilels gave his first public concert at twelve. While visiting the Odessa Conservatory in 1932, Arthur Rubinstein met and encouraged the young Gilels. Upon graduating in 1935, Gilels embarked on post-graduate work with the legendary Heinrich Neuhaus, who also taught Sviatoslav Richter and Radu Lupu. After winning first prize in the 1938 Ysaÿe International Festival in Brussels, Gilels s broadcast performances attracted the attention of Sergei Rachmaninoff, who subsequently regarded Gilels as his pianistic successor. Gilels was scheduled to make his American début in 1939 at the New York World s Fair, but the outbreak of World War II intervened. During the war, Gilels premiered Prokofiev s Eighth Piano Sonata and formed a trio with violinist Leonid Kogan and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1952 he became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and headed the jury of the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 that awarded first prize to Van Cliburn. For the next 25 years, Gilels international career steadily and consistently thrived. Though acclaimed for his Romantic bravura and imposing sonority that could penetrate any orchestra, Gilels was fully at home in the Classical repertoire. He became increasingly preoccupied with Beethoven s music in his last years, and had nearly completed a recorded cycle of the piano sonatas before his death on October 14, 1985, days short of his 69th birthday.
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