Tania and Éric Heidsieck were a French piano duo. Éric Heidsieck was born at Reims on 21 August 1936, gave his first recital at nine and his first concerto performance in May 1947. He studied at the École normale de musique de Paris from 1944 to 1952 and then at the Conservatoire de Paris with Marcel Ciampi, taking a first prize two years after entering; he also worked with Alfred Cortot and attended Wilhelm Kempff’s courses on Beethoven. In 1959 he won the Grand Prix du Disque for his EMI recordings of Mozart’s Concertos Nos. 21 and 24. The following year, in 1960, he and his wife Tania, herself a pianist, founded the duo, which went on to appear on stages around the world.

Both continued to work separately as well. Éric Heidsieck played the complete Beethoven sonatas from memory in public in 1969, at the Salle Gaveau, and recorded them for EMI in three separate campaigns between 1970 and 1997. He gave more than two thousand concerts, recorded some hundred discs between 1957 and 2004, and taught for eighteen years at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, later at the Schola Cantorum. Very little has been published about Tania Heidsieck’s own training and early career, and the reference sources consulted here record her chiefly through the partnership.

The duo’s standing rests on a long international performing career. Founded in 1960, it appeared widely abroad over several decades, and the reference sources consulted describe it as the ensemble through which both players were known outside their solo work.

Its identity was closely bound to Éric Heidsieck’s separate reputation as an interpreter of Beethoven and Mozart, formed under Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff and documented in a discography of more than a hundred discs, including three recorded traversals of the Beethoven sonatas and the Mozart concerto recordings that won the Grand Prix du Disque in 1959. What the duo itself committed to record is not set out in any of the general reference sources consulted, none of which itemises its releases, so its discography would need to be established from the recordings themselves before being described on the page.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Heidsieck
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Heidsieck
https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Heidsieck-Eric.htm