Biography (read more)
Lazar Berman was born in Leningrad on 26 February 1930. His mother, herself a pianist, put him to the instrument at two; he was entering competitions at three and composing by seven, before he could read music, and was identified as a prodigy by the age of four. He studied with the Russian pedagogues Samariy Savshinsky and Alexander Goldenweiser.
In 1956 he won two major competitions in the same year, taking prizes at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels — where Vladimir Ashkenazy was also among the winners — and at the Franz Liszt Competition in Budapest. From 1959 to 1971, however, Soviet authorities barred him from travelling abroad because he had married a French national, and the international career those prizes should have opened was withheld from him for twelve years.
His breakthrough in the West came with a New York debut at the 92nd Street Y in 1975, playing Liszt’s Transcendental Études; a New York Times critic wrote of fingers that blaze with fire. Recording contracts and engagements followed quickly, and he appeared under conductors including Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein. He later taught in Italy and Germany, and died in Florence on 6 February 2005, where he is buried.
Berman is associated above all with Liszt, and specifically with the Transcendental Études, the work that made his Western reputation overnight in 1975 and which remained the piece listeners measured him by. Rachmaninoff occupied a comparable place in his playing. In both he was valued for a scale and weight of sound that belonged to a Russian virtuoso tradition then largely inaccessible to Western audiences.
His career is also a case study in what political restriction costs a performer. The twelve years of enforced isolation between 1959 and 1971 meant that when he did appear in New York he arrived as a fully formed artist of 45 who was almost unknown outside the Soviet Union, and the shock of that arrival is part of why the debut is still discussed.
Emil Gilels called him a phenomenon of the musical world. In his later years in Italy and Germany he passed that tradition on directly through teaching.
Sources: