GABRILOVICH, OSSIP  BIOGRAPHY

Ossip Gabrilowitsch’s father Solomon owned a book shop, but as the business failed to achieve success he went to Paris to read law for two years at the Sorbonne. After completing his studies at Heidelberg he practised as a lawyer in St Petersburg but was always extremely fond of music. His wife, Rosa, had already given birth to one son, George, and Artur and Ossip were to follow although there were eleven years between George and Ossip. Rosa was from a small town on the German side of the Russian border, so the young Ossip heard both Russian and German at home as well as French from his governess. During his youth he met Tolstoy, and the Gabrilowitsch family spent their summers in Finland opposite the house of Gorky with whom young Ossip formed a close friendship.

Gabrilowitsch entered the St Petersburg Conservatory at the age of ten where he studied piano with the great Anton Rubinstein after preliminary studies with Victor Tolstoff. His teachers for composition and harmony were Navrátil, Liadov and Glazunov. At sixteen he graduated, winning the coveted Rubinstein Prize, and upon Rubinstein’s suggestion he travelled to Vienna, with his mother and sister, to continue studies with Leschetizky. His public debut in Berlin was such a success that he gave a second concert at once and, after a third recital, was engaged to play a Beethoven concerto with Arthur Nikisch and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Before the season was over he gave a fourth recital in Berlin and was then invited to London to play under Hans Richter. He toured Europe and Russia for many years, becoming an intimate friend of Gustav Mahler during his time in Vienna. Ossip and his brother Artur used to visit the Mahler family in the Dolomites where they spent their summers, and Gabrilowitsch wrote of the great composer, ‘Mahler is to me the very incarnation of the highest ideals, artistic and human. I did not believe such ideals could ever be realised until I met him. To have known him made life seem nobler – more worth living.’

After Gabrilowitsch’s first tour of America as a pianist in 1900 he returned many times, deciding to settle there in 1914. In 1909 he had married Clara Clemens, a contralto and the daughter of Mark Twain, and often gave recitals with her. Anton Rubinstein had been famous for the vast series of Historical Recitals which he gave in many of the world’s capital cities during the 1880s, and this may have prompted Gabrilowitsch to adopt a similar idea. During 1915, in New York, Boston and Chicago he played a series of six recitals of piano music covering ‘the development of piano music from the days of the clavichord to the Present Time’. These were recitals he had given a few years before in Munich and Berlin, and they were later expanded into six lecture-recitals in the 1925–1926 season. At the end of his career he performed a similar illustrative series, but this time of piano concertos; he played sixteen concertos in five concerts.

Gabrilowitsch also favoured conducting, which he had studied with Nikisch in Leipzig in 1905–1906, and from 1910 to 1914 he was in charge of the concerts of the Munich Konzertverein. He first conducted in New York in 1916 and was appointed conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra two years later, a post he held until his death from cancer in 1936. From 1928 to 1931 he also conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra, but always continued his work as a pianist and chamber musician. After his twenty-fifth anniversary orchestral concert, where he played the B flat minor Concerto of Tchaikovsky under Stokowski, his performance was described as ‘…the kind of playing, in its great lines, its unlimited power and rich musical feeling, that is said to have been frequent in a former day – which it certainly is not in this one’. After his solo recital at the same time it was reported that ‘…he has maintained inviolate his selfless devotion to his art, his sanity, his rare perceptions of beauty.’

Gabrilowitsch was a refined and polished pianist; everything is revealed with clarity and precision yet underlined with warmth and poetry. For an artist of his great talent he made very few recordings, the solo discs (some of which were unpublished at the time) barely filling a single compact disc. Apart from a few sides he made as conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1928, he made both an acoustic (1923–1924, abridged) and electric (1927) recording of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat Op. 44 with the Flonzaley Quartet. The 1927 version shows a palpable rapport between the musicians, and demonstrates what an exceptional chamber music player Gabrilowitsch was – an uncommon attribute for a piano virtuoso of his quality. The solo discs made just around the time of the change from acoustic to electrical recording between 1924 and 1925 are all of encore pieces. Music by Moszkowski, Grainger, Schumann, Arensky, Gabrilowitsch himself, and his teacher Glazunov all appear on these Victor discs, and all are superior examples of taste and style in pianism. Highlights include Gabrilowitsch’s own Caprice Op. 3, given a scintillating reading, and a rollicking Shepherd’s Hey by Percy Grainger.

Gabrilowitsch used to tour with Harold Bauer giving two-piano recitals, and his most famous recording is of the Waltz from the Suite for Two Pianos Op. 15 by Arensky. As New York Times critic Harold Schonberg so memorably wrote, ‘…a lovelier piano disc has never been made.’