Grieg / Schumann: Piano Concertos

Gieseking's father was a distinguished German doctor with a keen interest in entomology who travelled in France and Italy. As a result, his son Walter was born in Lyons, France, and spent the first sixteen years of his life in southern France and Italy. Although the young Gieseking played the piano from the age of four, he had no proper tuition until his family moved in 1911 to Hanover, where at the age of sixteen he became a pupil of Karl Leimer at the Hanover Conservatory, studying for three years, after which he had no further tuition. At the age of twenty Gieseking performed the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in six recitals. World War I, however, interrupted the beginnings of his career, and it was not until 1920, when he was already 25, that Gieseking made his début in Berlin at the first of seven recitals in the city that season. Although he played music by Debussy and Ravel, composers with whom he would be associated throughout his life, Gieseking was hailed as 'the new Anton Rubinstein', a title which would hardly have been applied to the Gieseking of the 1950s, by which time he was acknowledged as one of the finest interpreters of the French impressionists.