Biography (read more)
Walter Chodack was born in New York in 1935 to parents of Russian origin. He began the piano at four and gave his first recital at seven. He took bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music, graduating in 1957, and a Fulbright scholarship then took him to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. From 1960 he worked with Leonard Shure, who had been Artur Schnabel’s assistant.
He settled permanently in France in 1961, and recorded his first albums there for Philips. He established a reputation as a Beethoven player while keeping a wide interest in twentieth-century and contemporary music alongside the classical repertoire. In 1977 the Académie Charles-Cros awarded him its Grand Prix du Disque for recordings of Copland, Gershwin and Kalajian. From 1989 he recorded for Le Chant du Monde, among other things the complete Mozart variations.
Chodack’s position rests on two things held together. One is a Beethoven line inherited at one remove from Artur Schnabel, by way of Leonard Shure, and reinforced by study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. The other is an advocacy of twentieth-century music unusual in a pianist known as a classicist: his declared preferences run to Bartók, Berg, Messiaen and Boulez, and to American composers, Carter, Gershwin and Copland among them.
The Grand Prix du Disque he received from the Académie Charles-Cros in 1977 was awarded for American repertoire rather than for the German classics, which indicates where the distinctive part of his contribution was recognised. His later association with Le Chant du Monde, begun in 1989, extended his recorded catalogue in the other direction, taking in the complete Mozart variations.
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