Biography (read more)
Vladislas Perlemuter, known as Vlado, was born at Kovno, now Kaunas in Lithuania, on 26 May 1904, into a Polish Jewish family. He lost the use of his left eye in an accident at the age of three. The family moved to France in 1907, and in 1915, at ten, he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire. He studied there with Moritz Moszkowski from 1915 to 1917 and afterwards with Alfred Cortot, graduating at fifteen with a first prize after playing Fauré’s Thème et variations in the presence of the composer.
Having first heard Ravel’s Jeux d’eau in 1925, he went in 1927 to Montfort-l’Amaury and spent six months working through the whole of Ravel’s solo piano music with the composer, who was by his account very critical and often very harsh. He played the complete cycle in public in 1929, and again in 1987. As a Jewish pianist in occupied France he narrowly escaped to Switzerland during the Second World War, remaining there until 1949. He joined the teaching staff of the Paris Conservatoire in 1951 and stayed until 1977. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 4 September 2002, aged ninety-eight.
Perlemuter’s authority in Ravel came directly from the composer, and the two complete traversals of the solo piano music, in 1929 and again in 1987, bracket a performing career of more than seventy years built around that repertoire together with Chopin and Fauré. He recorded extensively for Nimbus and for Vox, and those recordings are the principal document of a way of playing French music with an unusually short line of transmission back to its source.
He was equally consequential as a teacher. Twenty-six years on the staff of the Paris Conservatoire, from 1951 to 1977, produced pupils including Christian Zacharias, Kathryn Stott and Michel Dalberto. His teaching is remembered for its insistence that pedalling is governed by the ear rather than by the foot, a formulation that has outlived the lessons it came from.
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