Michel Block
Michel Block was born of French parents in Antwerp, Belgium. He was a renowned pianist and winner of the 1962 Leventritt Competition. As a child, he moved with his parents to Mexico, where his grandfather had settled in 1870. Block studied piano in that country and later at the Juilliard School in New York City.
In one of the most famous of all competition incidents, Block won the Arthur Rubinstein Prize in Warsaw at the 1960 International Chopin Piano Competition. As a contestant in that year's competition, he was only placed eleventh. Outraged with this result, Arthur Rubinstein created a special prize bearing his name on the spot, which carried with it the money corresponding to the second prize, and awarded it to Block. Two years later, Michel Block won the Leventritt Competition in New York, adding his name to the illustrious list of winners, among which Alexis Weissenberg, Van Cliburn, and Eugene Istomin.
Block appeared with the great orchestras and conductors in the United States and in Europe. Among them were the Berliner Philharmoniker, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam; and among the conductors, Georg Solti, Carlo Maria Giulini, Riccardo Muti, and Bernard Haitink.
In 1978, Block joined the music faculty at Indiana University Bloomington, and greatly reduced his concertizing. In later years, he rarely performed in public. In 1996, he performed in New York for the first time in nearly 15 years at the Pro Piano Recital Series.
His playing was characterized by a rich singing tone, lyrical phrasing, transparent voicing, and wonderful dynamic control. In 1997, Block retired from teaching and lived a quiet, uneventful, and happy life.
Block made numerous recordings for major labels, including EMI, Pathé Marconi, Pro-Piano and Deutsche Grammophon. He recorded music by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, J.S. Bach, Franz Schubert, Enrique Granados, Alexander Scriabin, and Isaac Albéniz.
