Biography (read more)
Jorge Bolet was born in Havana on 15 November 1914. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his teachers included David Saperton, Leopold Godowsky, Josef Hofmann, Moriz Rosenthal, who had himself been a pupil of Liszt, and Fritz Reiner.
He won the Naumburg Competition in 1937 and gave his debut recital in the same year, and taught at Curtis from 1939 to 1942. In 1942 he joined the United States Army and was sent to Japan with the Army of Occupation, where he conducted the Japanese premiere of The Mikado.
He was professor of piano at Indiana University from 1968 to 1977, and from 1977 head of piano at the Curtis Institute, succeeding Rudolf Serkin; he resigned the post in order to concentrate on performing. His health declined from 1988, and he underwent brain surgery in 1989 from which he never fully recovered. He died of heart failure at Mountain View, California, on 16 October 1990.
Bolet is remembered for the romantic repertoire, and above all for Liszt, alongside César Franck and Chopin. He was a specialist in piano transcriptions and in the music of Leopold Godowsky, which he had studied with the composer himself, a direct line that gives his readings of that difficult repertoire an unusual authority.
His career took an atypical shape. American critics had for years faulted him for what they regarded as an excessive concentration on romantic virtuosity, and he came to national prominence only in 1974, with a Carnegie Hall recital that changed his standing. Decca/London signed him in 1978, when he was sixty-four; it was his first systematic exposure to life at a major international label, and the recordings that followed are the basis of his reputation today. Earlier discs had appeared on Boston in 1952 and on Remington in 1953, the latter including Prokofiev’s Second Concerto and the four Chopin scherzos.
He also recorded the piano soundtrack for the 1960 Liszt biopic Song Without End, which won the Academy Award for Best Music Score.
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