![]() ‘A concert pianist ought to have the widest possible repertoire, although my old record company didn’t share that view’ – Charles Rosen Reviewing a recital he gave at New York’s Town Hall in 1953, Virgil Thomson wrote that Rosen was ‘at 26, one of the great piano technicians’, adding: ‘Under all the precocity lies a musical mind of great strength and modesty.’ ![]() With positive critical acclaim for his early recordings and recitals, he was able to embark on a full-time career at the piano by his mid-twenties. ‘He never spoke about Liszt’s teaching methods, although I learnt a lot by just being around him.’ After earning his doctorate in French literature at Princeton University, Rosen taught French at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ![]() ![]() ‘I met Rosenthal because we had the same dentist,’ Rosen recalled when I interviewed him in 1997. He was exposed to the last bastions of Romantic pianism’s golden age through his teachers, the Theodor Leschetizky pupil Hedwig Kanner and her husband, Moriz Rosenthal, who had studied with Liszt. Born in Manhattan on May 5, 1927, to an architect father and an actress and pianist mother, Rosen started piano at four and was later enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music. ![]() Charles Rosen’s latter-day reputation as one of the most erudite writers on music of his generation tends to overshadow his considerable accomplishments as a pianist. ![]()
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