Nicholas Angelich, acclaimed classical pianist, dies at 51
Angelich, a pianist renowned for the uncommon skill and sensitivity that he brought to the works of Romantic composers including Beethoven and Brahms, died April 18 at a hospital in Paris. He was 51.
The cause was degenerative lung failure, his manager, Stefana Atlas, confirmed in an email.
Mr. Angelich was one of three major figures in classical music to die in recent days: The Romanian pianist Radu Lupu died April 17, and the British composer Harrison Birtwistle died April 18.
Mr. Angelich was the American-born son of two immigrant musicians — his father, who was from Yugoslavia, was a violinist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and his mother, from Russia, was a music teacher who gave her son his first instruction in piano.
She moved with Mr. Angelich to Paris when he was 13 so that he could attend the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse. Their move marked the beginning of a decadeslong career that would take Mr. Angelich back and forth across the Atlantic to the leading concert halls of Europe and the United States.
His style, music critic Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times, was distinguished by “unflashy fluidity and clarity, the best kind of virtuosity.”
Mr. Angelich performed and recorded as a recitalist, orchestra soloist and chamber musician. He was known particularly for his interpretations of the works of the Romantic composers of the 19th century: Beethoven, SchuNicholas mann, Chopin, Liszt and especially Brahms.
“I have lived with his music for a very long time,” Mr. Angelich said in an interview published on the website MusicWeb International. “When I was a young boy I heard a lot of Brahms’s music played in the house. So you could say that I owe my love for Brahms to my parents.”
But Mr. Angelich also pushed his repertoire deeper into the past, to include the Baroque works of Bach, as well as into the 20th century and beyond, to encompass composers including Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartok, Ravel and Boulez. Mr. Angelich studied in Paris with Yvonne Loriod, the wife of French composer Olivier Messiaen, for whom Mr. Angelich performed on several occasions.
“I . . . like very much the music of the 20th century and Russian music,” he told Gramophone magazine. “But that’s a whole different world. The problem that is sometimes very frustrating is that you cannot do everything at the same time.”
Nicholas Michael Angelich was born in Cincinnati on Dec. 14, 1970. His mother and father, whose surname was originally spelled Andjelitch, met as music students in Belgrade, Serbia.
After studying under his mother, Mr. Angelich made his debut at age 7, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21, according to Gramophone. Their subsequent move to Paris, he later reflected, introduced him to the often peripatetic experience of musicians.
“A very particular part of our lives,” he told an interviewer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, “is that we move away from home to study very oftentimes very early.”
Mr. Angelich’s teachers included Aldo Ciccolini, an Italian pianist known for his interpretation of the works of French composers, and Leon Fleisher, the celebrated American pianist who overcome a neurological disorder that for years robbed him of the use of his right hand.
Loriod, Mr. Angelich recalled, challenged him to take on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, a work of devilish technical difficulty, when he was only 17 years old. The task instilled in him the notion that music is not merely learned but also absorbed by musicians.
“I thought that I was too young,” Mr. Angelich said. “And she said, ‘No . . . you have to learn it now.
You’ll play it better later on.’ In a way, I think she was trying to say . . . it will bepartof... youasa musician. It will be part of your experience. And that was a very valuable lesson. She was right.”
Mr. Angelich made his New York recital debut at Alice Tully Hall in 1995 with a performance of Schubert, Rachmaninoff and Ravel, prompting Tommasini to declare that the 24-year-old pianist “boasts a prodigious technique but wields it with a poise uncommon in someone so young.”
Mr. Angelich, who stopped performing in 2021, had no immediate survivors.
In addition to his solo recordings of the works of Bach, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms and Prokofiev, among others, Mr. Angelich recorded with chamber musicians including the Capuçon brothers — Renaud, a violinist, and Gautier, a cellist.
“Music has to live, to breathe, what is on paper needs to be brought to life, and this is a mysterious process,” Mr. Angelich said. “You may admire all these great recordings from the past, but when you feel that the time has come that you are ready to record it, this really must be based on your own musical identity, your own character and the clear perception that you actually have something to say about that piece. You give it a very hard try and you do your very, very best to make the most out of it.”