Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Which pianists had the largest or broadest repertoire?

The pianist I would name would be Richter both in terms of largest(number of pieces) and broadest(number of composers). He played a tremendous amount of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy. Prokofiev, Rach, and Scriabin. The only composers that I think were mostly missing from his rep are Scarlatti, Spanish composers, and contemporary composers.

Which pianists, either contemporary or from the past, would you name as having very large and/or broad repertoires?

Gerald Moore, Alfred Cortot, J. Lawrence Cooke, innumerable cocktail pianists.

It's no accident that his rep broadened only after he started playing from the score. Before that, his rep was broadly similar to that of other contemporary Soviet stars like Gilels.

BTW, you left out Weber, Mussorgsky, Grieg, Franck, Tchaikovsky, Szymanowski....
Not to mention Hindemith, Bartók, Myaskovsky and Shostakovich, who, like Prokofiev (whose 6th sonata he premièred) were near contemporaries of his.

My vote goes to Marc-Andre Hamelin if strictly in terms of the width of repertoire.

Leslie Howard.

Among current pianists Hamelin is certainly plays/records a lot more of the non standard rep than maybe anyone else. He seems capable of learning large swaths of repertoire by relatively unplaced composers incredibly quickly.

I don't really know for sure how much of the more standard rep he plays but my impression is relatively little compared to pianists who mostly play the standard rep. How much Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, etc. does he play? I know he plays quite a bit of Haydn, a few Beethoven Sonatas including the last three, the Schubert 960, and a few Mozart Sonatas.

This Leslie Howard...

http://leslie-howard.com/html/about_us.html

Not this one....

https://youtu.be/mHZ_LWFaO0Q

I'll vote for Hamelin, He does play standard pieces as well, just not as often.

Of course he plays standard rep as well but the question is how much of it has he recorded or performed? I don't know the answer since I'm only familiar with some of his recordings and some of his recital programs, but my impression is that his standard rep quota
is somewhat low.

As you said, Hamelin is recording the complete Haydn sonatas, and has played and/or recorded plenty of music by all the composers you mentioned, plus Liszt, Chopin, Saint-Saens, Debussy, Ravel, Faure, and more (although, I am not aware of much Bach or Scarlatti from him). But overall, he plays just as much standard repertoire as he does non-standard repertoire. That's probably more true now than it was when he was younger, but he's said in multiple interviews that he doesn't want to be known as much as a pianist of non-standard repertoire, but just as a pianist in general.

Hi, PL! No one has yet said anything about Arthur Rubenstein, who is best known for his interpretations of the Standards, but who in his earlier days championed a number of contemporary composers, most particularly Villa Lobos. A few others I thought of, with respect to non-Standard repertoire -- Grant Johannesen certainly covered a lot of ground, as did Earl Wild. Also, Alicia de Larrocha had an extensive Standard repertoire in addition to her unparalleled expertise in Spanish music.

Grant Johannesen does not get mentioned much here. I had the privilege of being coached by him for about 15 minutes (during my regular lesson with another teacher) when I was preparing the Schumann Symphonic Etudes for a recital way back in 1974. Seemed like a very nice guy.