So there’s a long story behind this…
Before my teacher worked with Michelangeli, he studied as a young pianist in Israel with a Polish pianist, Karol Klein, who had been a student of Ignaz Friedman and immigrated to Tel Aviv after the war. My teacher said the guy was a tragic shell of a man; the war years had been a nightmare for him in Poland. (He couldn’t sleep/play right anymore, he was a nervous wreck, he couldn’t walk right due to having been either shot or tortured or both, not sure…)
But my teacher always talked about Klein as an amazing teacher, sharing anecdotes about Friedman and also Isidor Philipp in Paris, who had taught him either before or after Friedman…
That was all I knew/remembered… There’s almost nothing on Klein in English/German/French internet or libraries; I’ve looked many times over the years and even asked music librarians and archivists for help. But last year, I got lucky.
Somebody in Ukraine was getting rid of a huge collection of Syrena-Electro 78s on ebay. Mostly light Polish pop music, klezmer, and some classical (especially salon favorites) from the 20s and early 30s. But there was this record by a pianist named KAROL KLEIN, playing Liszt/Busoni and a Rach Etude-Tableau. I bought it immediately and thought, with what’s going on over there it might never come to me… but lo and behold months and months later, it did.
When I got the 78 and first put it on, it was a crazy experience. I had done a lot of digging on the record company, Syrena-Electro, in the meantime. The factory was bombed when the Nazi invasion began in 1939 and the equipment taken, most of the records taken to Germany for scrap, according to Polish internet. The serial number of the record is higher than that of the last serial number I could find in a catalog online, which was released very shortly before the Nazi invasion in late '39. So this must have been really immediately thereafter, but not many copies or records remain of its existence, because the war started promptly after.
In other words, at least on the internet, it’s a non-existent record, and with all the physical records/catalogs destroyed during the war, it’s likely that this ‘ghost’ LP; it might be the only one in existence anywhere (there might be copies hiding in old radio archives or dusty basements somewhere, but who knows…)
According to the few references to Klein I could find on Israeli internet, he was born in 1908. Since this record was made shortly before the Nazi invasion in '39, that would make him 31 years old when he recorded it. It was certainly his last record and the only one for Syrena-Electro, but I wonder if he may have made another for another company before that. My teacher remembered he had played very infrequently on Israeli radio, but that was it after that, no studio work. I wonder if there might be old radio tapes in an archive somewhere, perhaps at the Tel Aviv Academy of Music? (That school was long ago merged with another and now is the Buchman-Mehta School of Music… With such big changes of administration over the decades it’d probably very hard to find anything, if it still exists… But man would I like to do some sleuthing…)
Listening, I realized what a sick virtuoso Klein had been, what a talent ruined by the war years. The performance is great, not only from a technical level but also the little interp shadings and rubati and the taste of it all… Makes you wonder again about all the fantastic pianists who’ve been forgotten/lost throughout the 20th century.
Anyways, a tragic and cool story for you guys. And also, pretty great to hear something of this quality which is TOTALLY UNKNOWN by the world, yeah? So, I decided to put both sides of the 78 on YT today, to make sure that some pianophiles besides my teacher and I remember who this guy was and how well he could play. Enjoy!
