The Complete RCA Victor Recordings

Release September 13, 2024

3 CD Edition

Misha Dichter was born in 1945 in Shanghai, where his Polish parents had fled on the Trans-Siberian Railway to await the end of the war. In 1947 the Dichter family moved to Los Angeles, where Misha began piano studies. His first important teacher was Aube Tzerko, who had studied with Artur Schnabel. “He started me literally from scratch,” Dichter recalls. But the hard work ultimately paid off when he was accepted into Rosina Lhévinne’s class at the Juilliard School.

“In the fall of 1965 I saw a poster in the cloakroom at Juilliard announcing the third annual Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow,” Dichter remembers. “I had just lost a few local competitions in Los Angeles, so I thought, why not go for the big one?” The young pianist’s victory taking the 1966 Silver Medal earned him a contract with RCA Victor, for whom he recorded the three acclaimed albums reissued here, and the international career of this “most refined of pianists” (High Fidelity).

Perhaps it was inevitable that Dichter’s debut for the label was devoted to Tchaikovsky’s B-flat minor Concerto, the very work that catapulted the competition’s first winner, Van Cliburn, to international stardom. Dichter was scheduled to perform the Tchaikovsky at Tanglewood, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf, so RCA duly arranged the recording sessions.

Dichter’s second album for RCA Victor combined selected Brahms piano pieces with Stravinsky’s 3 Movements from Petrushka, and with his third RCA release, the pianist turned to Beethoven and Schubert. Arthur Rubinstein approved of Dichter’s Schubert, so much so that he invited his young colleague to his Paris home, where a film crew captured Dichter playing Schubert’s B-flat Sonata D 960 in Rubinstein’s presence. Dichter has a particular fondness for the A major Sonata D 959: “it still represents the look and sound of paradise to me.”