Nicole Henriot-Schweitzer

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Nicole Henriot-Schweitzer (born November 25, 1925 in Paris , † February 2, 2001 in Louveciennes ) was a French pianist and music teacher .

Life

education

Nicole Marguerite Marie Henriot was born in Paris as the youngest child of the married couple Françoise and Émile Henriot. She started playing the piano at the age of six and showed herself to be a pianistic prodigy. At the age of 7 she became a student of Marguerite Long at the Paris Conservatory , and at the age of eight she gave concerts with Maurice Ravel and his piece Ma mère l'oye for piano four hands in Paris. In 1937 she was selected by Long, in the Parc d´Attraction at the Paris World Exhibition the works specially composed for this purpose by Ernesto Halffter Escriche , Bohuslav Martinů , Vittorio Rieti ,Tibor Harsanyi , Arthur Honegger , Frederic Mompou , Alexandre Tansman , Alexander Tscherepnin and Marcel Mihalovici . In 1939 she won third prize in the Gabriel Fauré competition in Luxembourg , whose jury presidency was Richard Strauss . At the age of 15, Henriot made a successful debut with the Paris Orchester Pasdeloup. Concerts with the Concerts Colonne, the Orchester Lamoureux , the Brussels Philharmonic and the Orchester Philharmonique Royal de Liège followed. She graduated from the Conservatory with honors.

War years

Henriot gave concerts in France and Belgium during the war years and supported the Resistance during the German occupation , whose active members included her two brothers. In June 1944, when the GeStaPo searched her apartment in Paris, she suffered a kidney injury from a rifle butt, and the pianist's left hand was broken because of her job. After the war, Henriot was one of the few civilians to receive the badge of the French military unit Commandos d-Afrique for their resistance services .

Career

Henriot's international career began after World War II. She was the first French pianist to perform in Great Britain after the demilitarization, and in January 1948 she made her debut in the United States with the New York Philharmonic under Charles Münch and the Ravel Piano Concerto . This performance was an overwhelming success, which earned her the “fail thunderer” attribution by Time magazine and the recognition of other musicians. In a letter to Long, Rudolf Firkušný was enthusiastic about the young pianist's concert performance, which he described as "worthy of admiration". The New York debut concert also marked the beginning of Henriot's lifelong friendship with Pierre Boulez , John Cage and the art patron Pierre Sountchinsky.

Charles Münch had known Henriot since her youth. While preparing for the competition, he rehearsed Brahms' Second Piano Concerto with the young pianist and accelerated the tempo of the Scherzo in the second movement so much that Henriot stopped playing and countered the conductor that she could play it as fast as she wanted, but it was Piece not appropriate. Münch, offended, then left the rehearsal. The next day the two spoke out. Henriot first appeared in public with Münch and the Orchester de la Société des concerts du Conservatoire on April 12, 1942, performing Liszt's 1st piano concerto . She then gave concerts regularly under Münch's baton - in London in 1944, in Strasbourg in 1945, then in Israel, Vienna and The Hague, and for the first time in Frankfurt in 1949.

In 1957, Münch introduced Henriot to his nephew, the Rear Admiral of the French Navy Jean-Jacques Schweitzer - also a nephew of Albert Schweitzer on his mother's side . In 1958 Nicole Henriot and Jean-Jacques Schweitzer married and in the early 1960s they settled outside Paris near Versailles on an estate in Louveciennes on which Münch also owned a house.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Henriot, who called herself Henriot-Schweitzer after her marriage, performed mainly as a soloist in piano concerts under the baton of Charles Münch. She toured through Europe, the Scandinavian countries, the Soviet Union, the Middle East and North and South America.

She gave up her concert career in the early 1970s due to progressive arthritis in her left hand and taught at the University of Liège from 1970 to 1973 and then as a professor at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels . She was also a juror at international piano competitions, a. a. at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition 1973, 1981 and 1989 and the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow 1978 and 1982.

Henriot-Schweitzer died in her house in Louveciennes in 2001 and was buried next to her husband, who died in 1993, and Charles Münch, who died in 1968, in the village cemetery.

Jean-Philippe Schweitzer, Henriot-Schweitzer's son, was President of the Long-Thibaud-Crespin Foundation from 2006 to 2017, which organizes the Long-Thibaud-Crespin competition .

effect

Henriot-Schweitzer became widely known through her close artistic collaboration with Charles Münch, under whose direction she accompanied the Boston Symphony Orchestra as a soloist from 1949 to 1962 and the Orchester de Paris from 1967/68. The two combined a “special relationship” and the “cooperation” in “Prokofieff's 2nd Concerto, the G major Concerto by Ravel and the […]“ Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français ”by Vincent d'Indy testifies to a chamber music style intimate familiarity and flexible synchronicity that is only very seldom audible.

In an obituary in the New York Times , her pianistic reputation was located in the liveliness of the performances of music from Liszt to Prokofiev . In addition, she was considered a specialist in the works of the French composers Ravel, Fauré and Milhaud . Virgil Thomson called her "one of the leading interpreters of the French composers of her generation". Several recordings by Henriot-Schweitzer are available.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Musique. (PDF) La Semaine Radio Canada, 1959, accessed on March 3, 2019 (French, edition Vol. X No. 5, page 3).
  2. ↑ Raj Bhimani: My introduction to Ravel. Serenade Magazine, October 31, 2018, accessed March 3, 2019 .
  3. ^ Cecilia Dunoyer: Marguerite Long: A Life in French Music, 1874-1966. Indiana University Press, Bloomington (Indiana) 1993, ISBN 978-0-2533-1839-8 (English). ( limited preview in Google Book search)
  4. ^ Richard Strauss-Blätter, issues 41-44, Internationale Richard Strauss-Gesellschaft, 1999, p. 39.
  5. ^ Cecilia Dunoyer: Marguerite Long: A Life in French Music, 1874-1966. Indiana University Press, Bloomington (Indiana) 1993, ISBN 978-0-2533-1839-8 (English). ( limited preview in Google Book search)
  6. ↑ D. Kern Holoman: Charles Munch. Oxford University Press , Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-1997-7270-4 (English). ( limited preview in Google Book search)
  7. ↑ Nicole Henriot to Perform At Artist Series January 7. The Lawrencean, December 14, 1951, accessed on March 3, 2019 .
  8. ↑ French Pianist here February 6. Ashland Collegian, February 3, 1950, accessed February 3, 2019 .
  9. ^ Cecilia Dunoyer: Marguerite Long: A Life in French Music, 1874-1966. Indiana University Press, Bloomington (Indiana) 1993, ISBN 978-0-2533-1839-8 (English). ( limited preview in Google Book search)
  10. ↑ Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Robert Samuels (eds.): The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Cambridge University Press 1995, ISBN 978-0-5214-8558-6 (English), pages 33, 53, 60, 92 and 134.
  11. ↑ D. Kern Holoman: Charles Munch. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-1997-7270-4 (English). ( limited preview in Google Book search)
  12. ↑ D. Kern Holoman: Charles Munch. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-1997-7270-4 (English). ( limited preview in Google Book search)
  13. ↑ D. Kern Holoman: Charles Munch. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, 232.
  14. ^ Lynn Darling: The Competition. In: The Washington Post, June 1, 1981 (English).
  15. ↑ Histoire. Long-Thibaud-Crespin competition , accessed on March 3, 2019 (French).
  16. ↑ Christoph Schlüren: Verve, shine and passion: The Charles Munch Edition at Sony Classical. Neue Musikzeitung , December 31, 2016, accessed on March 4, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Associated Press : Nicole Henriot - Pianist, 75th The New York Times, February 10, 2001, accessed March 4, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles, 1940-1954. Library of America, 2014, ISBN 978-1-5985-3309-5 (English). ( limited preview in Google Book search)
personal data
SURNAME Henriot-Schweitzer, Nicole
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Henriot, Nicole
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French pianist and music teacher
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 2, 2001
Place of death Louveciennes