William Kapell

William Kapell ( born September 20, 1922 in New York City; † October 29, 1953 in a plane crash over Half Moon Bay ( California)) was an American pianist.

The deceased was tragically early as the greatest pianist hope America before Van Cliburn and the Canadian Glenn Gould.

After studying at the prestigious Juilliard School in his hometown of New York in 1942, he won both the price of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the price of the Naumburg Foundation and debuted shortly thereafter in New York. In the same year he performed the Piano Concerto by Aram Khachaturian, which was in the following years to become his " flagship " - so much so that one jokingly " Khatchaturian Kapell " called him.

But Kapell was anything but a specialist. In his short career he stretched his repertoire from Johann Sebastian Bach to Sergei Prokofiev and proved to diverse works not only its spectacular art, but also a thoroughly modern interpretation approach that is not equated romance with sentimentality, mainly the piano concertos by Sergei Rachmaninoff excellent got.

His movie star looks and even his happy marriage to Rebecca Anna Lou Melson, from which emerged two children, made ​​him the idol of the native title pages. His recordings, among others, with Antal Doráti, Dimitri Mitropoulos and Leopold Stokowski, Kapell but show as a serious artist, the prolonged life certainly would have succeeded and the European breakthrough.

Aaron Copland said of him: "His unique passion for the art that we both loved, was downright scary, even for a composer like me. "

• Classic pianist
• American musician
• Born in 1922
• Died in 1953
• Man