To his champions, a vociferous minority, he was a “legendary pianist”, little short of the greatest performing artist of the 20th century. Others, while conceding that he exhibited flurries of sublime technical brilliance, found his precision-based playing to be cold, detached and even violent.
One British critic suggested after a performance of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto that “the poor piano might have brought a wholly justified charge of assault and battery” against him. An American counterpart reported that his playing “offered all the warmth and humanity of an autopsy”, while another concluded that he “conveyed as much sentiment as a sausage machine”.
Whichever the case, a Weissenberg concert – and they were few – was guaranteed to draw a capacity audience, even if some of those on their feet at the end were scurrying to leave rather than to award the artist a standing ovation.
He was equally enigmatic in person. Asked once how much of his playing was intuitive and how much pre-planned, he replied: “All of it is intuitive and all of it is pre-planned.”
Alexis Sigismond Weissenberg was born to a Jewish family in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, on July 26 1929. His mother was his first teacher, followed by a disciplinarian dentist and then Pancho Vladigerov, the leading Bulgarian exponent of the time.
After the German alliance with Bulgaria in 1941, his family tried to flee the country on false papers but were discovered and taken to what he described as “an improvised concentration camp”. Only three elements remained constant, he recalled: “Silence, singing, and crying.” Among their few belongings was an accordion on which the young Sigi played Schubert for the German guards. One took a liking to him and, one night, hustled the family on to a train bound for Istanbul and freedom.
From there they made their way to Jerusalem, where Weissenberg studied with Leo Kestenberg and performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the Jerusalem Radio Orchestra. He arrived in New York in 1946 with letters of introduction from Kestenberg to Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Schnabel; soon he was studying at the Juilliard School.
Horowitz felt that Weissenberg, who some said was the spitting image of Rachmaninov, had experienced too much solitude, and encouraged him to enter the Leventritt Competition in 1947, which Weissenberg duly won.
That year he made his New York debut playing Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under George Szell.
After a decade as a touring artist, Weissenberg disappeared from public view, not reappearing until 1966 when he showed up in Berlin playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto under Herbert von Karajan, who had been impressed by a highly-stylised video performance that Weissenberg had made of Stravinsky’s Petrushka.
The link with Karajan, notwithstanding the conductor’s Nazi affiliations, became a strong one, with some commentators identifying their ice-cold personas and clinical dissection of the music as a common bond. They recorded the complete Beethoven piano concertos together.
After some years living in Paris, Weissenberg settled in Spain, and little more is known about his private life other than that he married and had a son and two daughters. From time to time he would appear in concerts, including occasional forays to London where he continued to polarise audiences; he would then vanish again from the public sphere.
His own compositions, wide-ranging in style and bearing elements of jazz (even though he once described the “state of jazz” as “inebriation, contamination, paroxysm, hysteria, palpitation and insanity”), were championed by the pianist Simon Mulligan, who has released several on the Nimbus label.
Alexis Weissenberg, born July 26 1929, died January 8 2012
