Malcolm Frager - 1947 Award Winner 

Malcolm Frager (1935-1991)

Malcolm Frager began playing the piano at four, gave his first recital at six, and made his debut with the St. Louis Symphony when he was ten, performing a Mozart concerto (K.453) under the direction of Vladimir Golschmann.

At age 14 he went to New York to study with Carl Friedberg, a pupil of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Frager won first prize at both the Leventritt Competition in New York and the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium Competition in Brussels, which Time called "two of the toughest competitions in music."

His international tours took him to 77 countries on five continents and include engagements and reengagements with virtually every major orchestra in the United States and Europe (among them the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, all the London orchestras, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, the Dresden Staatskapelle, as well as the orchestras of Paris, Madrid, Rome, Munich, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Moscow).

Frager's uniqueness lay in his uncompromising approach to music making. He was among the most learned and probing of thinkers, one who sought above all to reveal as faithfully as possible the authentic voice of each composer. That process necessitated the careful study of the printed score, and most especially of first editions and original manuscripts. Frager' s own library (now housed at the Sibley Library -Special Collections at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York) is a model for the scholarly musician. His desire for authenticity led to his discovery of numerous manuscripts. Chief among those is the Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra ( 1841) by Robert Schumann, a work that served (in a slightly revised version) as the first movement of the later Piano Concerto in a-minor, Op.54 (1845). Frager located the manuscript in 1967 and premiered this previously unknown version with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf in 1968. He also preferred the seldom heard, original version of the Tschaikovsky Piano ConQerto No. 1 in b-tlat minor, Op,23, with its rolled chords in the opening.