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Rosalyn Tureck, Pianist Specializing in Bach, Dies at 88
July 19, 2003
By ALLAN KOZINN
Rosalyn Tureck, a pianist and harpsichordist who played an important
part in the revival of interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and
who devoted more than six decades to performing, researching, teaching and
writing about his works, died on Thursday at her home in Riverdale, the
Bronx. She was 88.
Ms. Tureck, born in Chicago, spent many years living in London,
where she acquired a regal bearing and the hint of an upper-crust British
accent. She was as comfortable in literary and scientific circles as in
musical ones, and was ahead of her time in arguing for a view of Bach, and
of music-making, that drew on scholarship, yet was entirely nondogmatic and
even fairly freewheeling.
She could argue, for example, that it was crucial to understand Bach
not as a modern thinker, or as the beginning of music as we know it today,
but as the peak of musical development from medieval times through the
Protestant Reformation. In the same discussion, though, she could speak
enthusiastically about performances of Bach on electronic instruments.
Early in her career, before she decided to focus entirely on Bach,
she was an avid interpreter of contemporary music and a composer herself,
although she did not perform her
works publicly. And because she studied as a child with Jan Chiapusso, a
Dutch-Italian concert pianist born in Java, she was introduced to the sounds
of the gamelan and a variety of Asian and African instruments decades before
the current interest in world music.
Ms. Tureck was born on Dec. 14, 1914, and became interested in the
piano when she was 4. An intuitive musician with perfect pitch, she learned
the instrument at first by imitating what she heard at an older sister's
piano lessons. Her first teacher was Sophia Brilliant-Liven, a Russian
pianist who had been a teaching assistant to Anton Rubinstein. Ms. Tureck
studied the Romantics with her, as well as Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart and
late-19th- and early-20th-century Russian composers.
In those days, Bach was widely considered to be primarily didactic
music, good for developing students' hand muscles but too dry for the
concert hall. Ms. Tureck, though, was fascinated by his work, and at 14,
when she began studying with Chiapusso, she made a point of memorizing a
prelude and fugue from "The Well-Tempered Clavier" between lessons.
Chiapusso was the first to suggest that she specialize in Bach, and although
she continued to study the full range of the piano repertory, she also began
to focus on Bach's music, as well as his techniques of ornamentation and the
kinds of instruments he used.
When she was 16, Ms. Tureck moved to New York to study with Olga
Samaroff at the Juilliard School, and immediately declared her interest in
focusing on Bach. Samaroff was encouraging, but others were not. When she
entered the Naumburg Competition, she made it to the finals and presented an
all-Bach program as her closing recital. As she told the story years later,
the members of the jury said they could not give her the award "because they
were sure that nobody could make a career in Bach."
Ms. Tureck's first public performance in New York was not as a
pianist, but as a soloist on the theremin, an electronic instrument played
by moving one's hands through an electronic field, usually between two metal
poles. She played a Bach concerto. Her first real splash, however, was at
Town Hall in November 1937, when she played six all-Bach concerts, a series
regarded as daring, but that began to win her a following. She also
maintained a parallel career, playing recitals of Chopin, Scriabin and
Debussy, and in the 1940's, she performed Brahms and Beethoven concertos
with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.
Ms. Tureck continued to pursue her interest in new music as well.
She gave the premieres of works written for her by David Diamond, William
Schuman and Vittorio Giannini, and the European premieres of works by Aaron
Copland and Wallingford Riegger. She also formed Composers of Today, an
organization dedicated to bringing composers and performers together. Under
its auspices, works by Messiaen, Krenek and Hovhaness were given their first
New York performances. The group sponsored a concert by the composer
Vladimir Ussachevsky that is said to have been the first program of taped
electronic music in the United States.
In the late 1950's, though, Ms. Tureck began shedding her activities
that did not relate to Bach. Since 1947, she had been spending more time in
Europe, where the demand for her Bach concerts was greater than in the
United States. In 1957 she moved to London, where she formed a chamber
orchestra, the Tureck Bach Players, as well as the International Bach
Society, meant to be a forum in which musicologists and performers could
exchange ideas. In 1981 she started another organization with a similar
mission, the Tureck Bach Institute.
Ms. Tureck returned to New York in 1977, after 20 years abroad, and
announced her arrival with a 40th-anniversary celebration of her Town Hall
Bach series, performed at Carnegie Hall. She opened the series with two
performances of the <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="211095">"Goldberg Variations"</object.title> in one evening: first on
the harpsichord, then on the piano. The focus of her career, however,
continued to be Europe, and in the 1980's she moved back to England,
returning to New York only in the fall of 2001.
She continued to make recordings, including a series for the VAI
label, as well as one of her signature pieces, the "Goldberg Variations,"
for Deutsche Grammophon in 1998. In recent years, Deutsche Grammophon also
reissued some of her classic Bach recordings, including her 1953 account of
"The Well-Tempered Clavier." She published numerous articles on Bach, as
well as a three-volume collection of studies, "An Introduction to the
Performance of Bach."
Ms. Tureck is survived by a sister, Sonya Goldsmith, of Pittsburgh,
and two nephews, Dr. Alan Bramowitz, of Pittsburgh, and Dr. Stewart Bramson,
of Grasonville, Md.
She was scheduled to perform on Thursday evening at the
International Keyboard Institute and Festival at Mannes College of Music in
Manhattan, but had to withdraw when she became ill. Instead, the college
presented a tribute to her, which she was unable to attend. A friend, Rabbi
David M. Posner, said she died a few minutes after the tribute ended.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/19/obituaries/19TURE.html?ex=1059602439&ei=1&
en=465e7e1ec973d7dc
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