Malcolm Bilson

The fortepiano’s role in renditions of Mozart now strikes many listeners as a routine option alongside standard instruments. That acceptance was far from immediate, however, since Malcolm Bilson spent years advancing the cause largely by himself. Born in California in 1935, he enrolled at Bard College and concentrated on conventional piano study. After graduation he remained in Europe for three years, earning diplomas from the Vienna State Academy and the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, finished his doctorate at the University of Illinois, and joined its faculty in 1962. Receipt of the Rudolf Ganz Biennial Award for piano performance the following year placed him on a promising academic track.

His path shifted in 1968 upon his appointment at Cornell University, where he encountered period-instrument maker Philip Belt. Belt acquainted him with the fortepiano, the very instrument for which Mozart composed his sonatas and concertos. Though softer and less sustained than a modern concert grand, its greater agility impressed Bilson immediately. “It was the first time I’d been able to play every note Mozart had written,” he remarked. “The modern piano develops the tone slowly and is ideal for long, gradually unfolding lines but poor for phrases containing frequent changes in stress.” He began presenting concerts on the fortepiano, initially within academic circles, and later, as historically informed performance extended into the Classical period, on international stages. Bilson collaborated in recital with cellist Anner Bylsma and issued numerous recordings, among them the complete Mozart piano concertos with the English Baroque Soloists under John Eliot Gardiner for Deutsche Grammophon.

During the 1990s and 2000s, like many colleagues on period instruments, he turned increasingly toward music of the early nineteenth century. In 1994 he and his students performed the full set of thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas in New York, possibly the first such cycle heard in public on instruments from Beethoven’s era since their composition. The New York Times observed that “what emerged in these performances was an unusually clear sense of how revolutionary these works must have sounded in their time.” In addition to his solo work, Bilson generously participated in chamber and vocal projects, frequently appearing with Gardiner’s Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. His schedule in 2004 featured several engagements at Hungary’s Sopron Early Music Days festival.