Claude Frank, a pianist known for his elegant, patrician renditions of the Austro-German repertory, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89 and had been suffering from dementia. His death was confirmed by the Curtis Institute of Music, where he was a professor of piano.
A German-born refugee of Nazism, Frank took up the mantle of Beethoven performance passed on by his famous teacher, the pianist Artur Schnabel. Never a showman, and essentially conservative in his tastes, Frank was nonetheless revered for the insights and sense of taste he brought to Beethoven's towering piano sonatas. RCA released his set of all 32 for the Beethoven bicentennial in 1970, to widespread raves.
Frank was a piano faculty member at Curtis since 1988 and taught at the Yale School of Music since 1973. He lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in an extended musical family; he occasionally gave duo recitals with his wife, the late pianist Lilian Kallir, and, in his later years, with his daughter, the violinist Pamela Frank.
Born in Nuremberg, Germany – his father was a lawyer, his mother a semi-professional singer – Frank began piano lessons at the age of 6. At 12, he studied in Paris with a pupil of Schnabel and two years later fled the German occupation, stopping in Spain and Portugal before arriving in New York in 1941.
Frank studied piano—interrupted by a term of military service—with Artur Schnabel in New York, and had his recital debut at Town Hall in 1947. He performed with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1948 and had his New York Philharmonic debut under conductor Leonard Bernstein in 1959. He later appeared with many of the world's major orchestras, including all of the so-called “big five” (Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Cleveland) as well as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.
While by the mid 1970s Frank was playing 70 concerts a year on multiple continents, by the ‘80s he pulled back from the concerto circuit to focus on private teaching, master classes and chamber music. He often collaborated with colleagues from the annual Marlboro Festival in Vermont, where he was a regular guest almost since its start in the early 1950s (it was in Marlboro where he married Kallir in 1959). He also began playing with Pamela Frank, and made a complete recording of the Beethoven piano and violin sonatas for MusicMaster.
In 2002, Frank’s cycle of Beethoven sonatas was re-released in a 10-CD set. “In this repertory the competition is, of course, plentiful,” wrote Chicago Tribune critic John von Rhein in a review. “But he holds his own, even against such titans as Arrau and Rubinstein -- his quiet authority wears well over the long haul.”
Frank’s wife, Kallir, died in 2004. He is survived by Pamela Frank; his niece, Catherine Frank; and two nephews, Thomas Frank and Daniel Frank.