The greatest pianist you’ve never heard of

William Kapell was an American concert pianist with the looks of a male model and the fingers of a wizard. He played the concertos of Rachmaninov at dashing speed but with delicate precision. He was snapped up by RCA in 1944 at the age of 22 and the world’s leading conductors queued up to accompany him.

In October 1953 he toured Australia. On his last night there he visited Jascha Spivakovsky, a pianist who had escaped the Russian pogroms as a child, settled in Berlin and then fled to Melbourne after Richard Strauss warned him that he was on a Nazi hit-list. He spent the war helping fellow émigrés escape. That was one reason he never signed a recording contract. Also, Australia didn’t have a classical label. When Spivakovsky died in 1970 he hadn’t made a single record as a soloist.

That night, Spivakovsky played Kapell the slow movement of Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ Sonata.