Gregor Benko

Gregor Benko (* August 4, 1944 in Cleveland / Ohio) is an American journalist, record producer and collector of historic piano recordings.

Benko attended Kalamazoo College and then worked in a record store. In 1964 he founded, together with Albert Petrak in the Cleveland International Piano Archives, which were renamed after moving to New York in International Piano Library. In 1977, the collection, which included the now 40,000 historical records, tapes, music rolls, books and articles, the library of the University of Maryland has been transferred.

Benko was the basis of the collected material classes for piano students at the University, worked as a consultant of the now International Piano Archives of Maryland collection called, articles, discographies and reviews for music magazines and cover texts for records of historical recordings of Rachmaninoff, Hofmann, Godowsky and others wrote in the label RCA Records, Decca Records and Columbia Records. In HomophoneCD he edited the album The Muse surmounted that combines photographs of Florence Foster Jenkins with those of eleven contemporary pianists.

He also lectured at music festivals and at numerous American universities and worked as a consultant for historical musical materials at various libraries. Two years he was Director of Special Projects at PolyGram and two years partner of the owner of Lion Heart Autographs, a company dealing with historical documents.

More recently, he held joint talks with the New York music critic and author Harold C. Schonberg, whose memorial service at Carnegie Recital Hall in 2003, he headed. He is working on a television documentary and a biography of the pianist Józef Hofmann.

• Publicist
• Born in 1944
• Americans
• Man