Over to Basel, Switzerland this weekend for a performance of the Cembalo Sonata by Peter Mieg; performed here in a studio recording by Sylvia Kind from the Radiostudio of RTS on March 25, 1957.
No stranger to the pages of Past Daily, the name Peter Mieg draws question marks on the parts of most Classical Music listeners.
Mieg was born in Lenzburg where he spent almost all his life. He studied art history, archaeology, music history as well as French and German Literature in Zurich, Basel and Paris from 1927 to 1933. In the early 1930s Mieg became a journalist writing articles about art, music and literature for newspapers such as the Basler Nachrichten, the Weltwoche and the Badener Tagblatt.
Between 1933 and 1939 he became friends with the conductor and patron Paul Sacher and the composers Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger and Bohuslav Martinu.
A word or two about the soloist, Silvia Kind
Born Aug. 15, 1907, into an arts-loving family in Chur, Switzerland, Miss Kind first focused on sculpture but soon was drawn into musical studies (piano, flute, counterpoint, composition and conducting, all of which she studied at the Zurich Conservatory). At Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik, she met and studied with the famous composer, Paul Hindemith, who later became a close friend — as did the eminent novelist Günter Grass and the pianist Glenn Gould.
It was in Berlin that Miss Kind first discovered the harpsichord, and her preference for that instrument made her piano teacher (the noted Edwin Fischer) furious — but she would not be deterred. She gradually became a highly regarded authority on baroque performance practice and ornamentation, as well as a performer of considerable renown. Her European critics called her “absolutely superior” and “a brilliant virtuoso,” praising her “extraordinarily splendid mastery of her instrument.”
After a long career in performance, recording and teaching in Berlin and other European cities, Miss Kind came to Seattle for the first time in 1964. She performed a joint concert with the late cellist Eva Heinitz, another feisty virtuoso and UW faculty grande dame who died in 2001 — also at 94.
Enjoy the performance.
