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Michael Ponti, virtuoso pianist who recorded little known romantic composers – obituary

Michael Ponti, who has died aged 84, was a child prodigy and virtuoso pianist who revived – mostly in world premiere recordings – dozens of romantic piano concertos written in the second half of the 19th century; High Fidelity magazine described him as “Ten pianists in one”.

Michael Ponti - United Archives via Getty Images© United Archives via Getty Images

Ponti made his name in the late 1960s and 1970s by dusting off scores that had rarely been heard in the 20th century and recording them for the Vox/Turnabout and Candide labels. They were a revelation to a whole generation of music lovers, performed with breath-taking brilliance, if not always in top-quality sound. Among the names whose concertos he rescued from oblivion were Alkan, d’Albert, Berwald, Balakirev, Bronsart, Glazunov, Goetz, Hiller, Moszkowski, Henselt, Liapunov, Litolff, Medtner, Moscheles, Raff, Reinecke, Rheinburger, Anton Rubinstein, Xaver Scharwenka, Clara Schumann, Sinding, Tausig and Thalberg. 

Michael Ponti in 1983 - Fairfax Media via Getty Images© Provided by The Telegraph

Opinionated and ebullient, with a robust sense of humour, Ponti had an ego as big as his technique. “I’ve played 73 different works for piano and orchestra with 172 different conductors,” he boasted. “Fifteen of them have since died. That’s pretty good – over 150 conductors have survived the experience!”

He was famous for marathon recitals. For his 1972 New York debut at Alice Tully Hall, he recalled, “I started off with Beethoven’s [Sonata] Op 2 No 3, then the Tchaikovsky G major sonata, the three hardest Rachmaninov preludes, both books of Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini, the Scriabin G sharp minor sonata, [Three Movements from] Petrushka and then nine encores... It was midnight by the time we had all had enough.”

Michael Orrin Karl Ponti was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, on October 29 1937. His American father, Joseph, was an officer with the US consulate in Stuttgart.

In 1939 his German mother, Zita, who later became an American citizen, took her one-year-old son to the West Coast of America, her husband joining them in 1941. Two years later the family moved to Washington, where Ponti had his first piano lessons. Aged 10, he began seven years of studies with Gilmour McDonald, a pupil of Leopold Godowsky. Aged 11, he presented from memory all 48 Preludes and Fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in four recitals at the YMCA in Washington.

In 1955, with his father now working for the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service in Frankfurt, Ponti began six years of studies with Erich Flinsch, a former assistant to Emil von Sauer, a celebrated pupil of Liszt. Flinsch set about turning Ponti into a concert pianist.

Ponti made his first recordings in 1961, but his international career was launched only after he won first prize in the 1964 Busoni Competition. He made his debut in Vienna with five performances of Bartok’s Piano Concerto No 2 conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch. Then in 1968 came the call from Vox. The first two concertos for the label were by Moscheles and Henselt. More than 50 recordings followed; Vox paid him just $250 for each one.

Though Ponti played few recitals in the UK after 1983, he toured extensively throughout the rest of the world for 40 years, once playing more than 100 concerts in a single year. For Deutsche Grammophon he accompanied Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in an LP of songs by Charles Ives.

In later years he made his home in Eschenlohe, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Due to a stroke in 2000 he lost the use of his right hand, but for nearly a decade afterwards he was able to give concerts of music written for the left hand alone.

His first marriage, to Carmen Elena Wiechmann, was dissolved. His second wife, Beatrice (“Beike”) van Stappen, died in 2017. He is survived by three children from his first marriage and one from his second.