Biography (read more)
Éric Heidsieck was born on 21 August 1936 in Reims. He gave his first recital at the age of nine and his first concert with orchestra a year later.
He studied with Marcel Ciampi and then with Alfred Cortot, and followed Wilhelm Kempff’s lessons on Beethoven. In 1959 he won the Grand Prix du Disque for his EMI recordings of Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 21 and 24. The following year he and his wife Tania, also a pianist, founded a duo that performed internationally.
In 1969 he played Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas in public from memory, and recorded the cycle for EMI Classics between 1970 and 1974, returning to it a decade later and again in 1997. He has given more than two thousand concerts and a large number of master classes, and taught for eighteen years at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon. Between 1957 and 2004 he recorded approximately a hundred discs. He is also a composer of several cycles of mélodies.
Heidsieck belongs to a French line that runs directly back to Cortot, and his career has been unusual in combining that training with a sustained commitment to the Austro-German classical repertoire. The Beethoven sonatas are the centre of it: he performed the complete set from memory in 1969 and recorded it three times over roughly three decades, which makes the cycle a documented record of a changing interpretation rather than a single statement.
His Mozart is the other pillar. The recordings of the Concertos Nos. 21 and 24 that took the Grand Prix du Disque in 1959 came early in a discography that eventually reached about a hundred discs made between 1957 and 2004.
Alongside the solo career he worked for many years in a two-piano duo with his wife Tania, and taught for eighteen years at the Lyon Conservatoire, where his teaching passed the Cortot and Kempff inheritance on to French students of the later twentieth century.
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