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The legendary Robert Casadesus with the Orchestre National de la RadioDiffusion Francaise led by Pierre Monteux in a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 24 (K.491) – recorded broadcast from the Salle du Pavillon in Montreux Switzerland on September 21, 1958 by Radio Suisse Romande.
Robert Casadesus was born in Paris, and studied there at the Conservatoire with Louis Diémer, taking a Premier Prix (First Prize) in 1913 and the Prix Diémer in 1920. Robert then entered the class of Lucien Capet, who had exceptional influence. Capet had founded a famous quartet that bore his name (Capet Quartet) and in which two of Robert’s uncles played: Henri and Marcel. The Quartet often rehearsed in the Casadesus home, and so it was that Robert was exposed to chamber music. The Beethoven Quartets held no secret for him—he knew them backwards and forwards.
Beginning in 1922, Robert Casadesus collaborated with the composer Maurice Ravel on a project to create piano rolls of a number of his works. Casadesus and Ravel also shared the concert platform in France, Spain and England. Casadesus toured widely as a piano soloist and often performed with his wife, the pianist Gaby (L’Hôte) Casadesus, whom he married in 1921.
From 1935 Robert Casadesus taught at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. He and his family spent the Second World War years in the United States and had a home in Princeton, New Jersey. (Among his Princeton neighbors was Albert Einstein, an amateur violinist; the two played Mozart together privately on occasion.)
After the Fall of France in 1940, Robert and Gaby established the Fontainebleau School at Newport, Rhode Island. In 1942 the Fontainebleau School was moved to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. In 1943, he performed as part of a series of New York concerts meant to raise money for the Coordinating Council of the French Relief Societies.
After the war, in 1946, Robert Casadesus, now Director of the American Conservatory, oversaw its return to Fontainebleau. His pupils included Claude Helffer, Grant Johannesen, Olive Nelson Russell, Monique Haas, Mary Louise Boehm, Carol Lems-Dworkin, and William Eves, who appeared in the Casadesus-based Bell Telephone Hour fine arts documentary TV series “The First Family of the Piano” (1967) and was a longtime piano instructor at Bowdoin College. He continued recording and composing; his last composition, the Symphony No. 7, “Israel,” was a tribute to the people of Israel and was dedicated to his frequent collaborator George Szell; Szell died in the year the work was completed, 1970, and it was not premiered until shortly after Casadesus’s 1972 death, by an ensemble led by conductor Frederic Waldmann at Alice Tully Hall in New York City.
A product of the school of French pianism, his style of playing was classical and restrained with a very delicate approach to melody and line. He is especially noted as an interpreter of Mozart. Among his other recordings are those of the complete piano music of Ravel (for which he was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Academie Charles Cros and the Grand Prix de l’Academie du Disque), and the Beethoven Violin Sonatas with Zino Francescatti (of which the Kreutzer Sonata was filmed and has been released on DVD). The Bell Telephone Hour, a fine arts-related television series broadcast on NBC for many years, produced a one-hour television film, in 1967, on Robert, Gaby and their son Jean, titled “The First Family of the Piano.”
And now to the music.
