Jorge Bolet

Jorge Bolet was an American pianist and conductor of Cuban origin. He was born in Havana and later became known as a distinguished interpreter of the Romantic and post-Romantic piano repertoire. He was the brother of the conductor Alberto Bolet.

Bolet graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music, where his teachers included David Saperton, Leopold Godowsky, Moriz Rosenthal, Josef Hofmann, and Fritz Reiner. From 1939 to 1942 he also taught there. In 1937 he won the Naumburg Competition for young performers.

From 1942 he served in the army. While attached to the American occupation forces in postwar Japan, he conducted the Japanese premiere of Arthur Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Bolet did not enjoy particular fame, and only in the mid-1970s did recognition gradually come to him. According to the prominent American critic Harold Schonberg, this was connected with a general change in musical taste: Bolet's pianism was predominantly Romantic, and a new generation of musicians made that style of performance sought after again.

Bolet's concert performances and recordings of works from the Romantic and post-Romantic repertoire were highly regarded by specialists, above all his interpretations of Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, César Franck, Claude Debussy, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. His Liszt performances included the complete Years of Pilgrimage. In 1984, the American television company A&E broadcast a series titled Bolet Meets Rachmaninoff, a master class by Bolet devoted to Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 and culminating in a complete performance of the concerto.

An important place in Bolet's repertoire was also occupied by the exceptionally demanding works of his teacher Leopold Godowsky, including the transcriptions of Chopin's études and the paraphrase on themes from Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus.

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