Unlike their contemporaries and fellow musicians in much of Western Europe, the pianist and composer Alfred Grünfeld and his brother Heinrich, a cellist, were not sent by their parents to study law or to pursue a career in arms. On the contrary, from a very early age their audacious parents – the father, a leather merchant – raised them to develop an adult life as renowned professional musicians. It will be the older brother, Alfred, who will reap the greatest successes.
Alfred Grünfeld, pianist
Born in Prague in 1852, he was just over ten years old when he was sent to Berlin to study piano. Remarkably gifted, at 21 he was already settled in Vienna, developing a successful career as a piano teacher and concert pianist in the European musical capital of the time, where he remained until the end of his days, delighting Viennese audiences with his slightly syrupy, if very novel, piano transcriptions of the waltzes of Johann Strauss Jr.
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| Alfred Grünfeld (1852 - 1924) |
Also the author of a couple of operettas that did not stand the test of time, Grünfeld was the first major professional pianist to make recordings, the first of them in 1899 for the nascent Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft label. By 1914, he had made more than a hundred.
But as a composer – or rather an arranger – he is remembered today mainly for his Strauss transcriptions, which from time to time some intrepid pianist gives as an encore at the end of a slightly modern program, as compensation.
Soirée de Vienne
In Evgeny Kissin's version, one of Grünfeld's greatest successes is presented here, a paraphrase of Viennese waltzes entitled "Soirée de Vienne", a highly technically demanding piece. Grünfeld was a minor composer, of course, but as a performer, he must have been an outstanding pianist.
