Michael Ponti’s death a week before his 85th birthday comes more than two decades after the stroke that effectively ended his career, like those of Godowsky, Solomon and Cyril Smith.

‘Looks like a truck driver, plays like a god’ is what they used to say. With his thick neck and compact build, there remained a determination and an inner fire that his long illness failed to quench. Opinionated, punchy, and with an ego the size of his once-vaunted technique, Ponti refused to give in. It was only an indomitable spirit and the constitution of an ox that kept him going for so long.

The myriad recordings he made for the Vox Turnabout label in the 1960s and '70s of forgotten romantic piano concertos were a revelation to a whole generation of collectors, works that had often not been dusted off for a century and more but which sparkled into new life in the hands of this amazing musician, making you wonder why they were never played in today's concert halls.

What Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series has been doing since 1991 with multiple pianists, Ponti did on his own. Look at the list of composers whose forgotten concertos he championed, most often in premiere recordings: d’Albert, Moszkowski, Chopin-Wilkomirski, Reinecke, Bronsart, Henselt, Thalberg, Rheinburger, Scharwenka, Hiller, Glazunov, Rubinstein, Berwald, Medtner, Moscheles, Bronsart, Raff, Balakirev, Goetz, Liapunov, Litolff, Stavenhagen, Sinding, Alkan – to say nothing of the complete piano music of Tchaikovsky, Scriabin and Rachmaninov, making Ponti in each case the first pianist to commit these intégrales to disc.

Famous for marathon recitals, his 1972 New York debut at Tully Hall produced nine encores. ‘I ended with Scriabin’s 5^th Sonata,’ he told me. ‘It was midnight by the time we had all had enough.’ Disappointed that he was never invited to play with the Berlin Phil or the New York Phil (‘We can’t all have a career like Kissin’), his legacy is a body of recordings which, despite their sometimes-indifferent sound quality, will live on in the affections of pianophiles for many years to come.

Born in Germany (Freiburg im Breisgau), with an English first name and an Italian surname, he was fiercely American as his hopeless addiction to baseball might have indicated. His father was first generation Italian born in Seattle, Washington, and was an officer with the United States consulate in Stuttgart at the time Michael was born on 29 October 1937. His mother was German but later became an American citizen. At one year old she took him to the West Coast of America, his father joining them in 1941. Two years later the family was in Washington D.C. where Michael had his first lessons. Aged ten, he began seven years of studies with Gilmour McDonald, a pupil of Leopold Godowsky. Aged eleven, he presented all 48 Preludes and Fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier from memory in four recitals at the YMCA in Washington.

In 1955 with his father posted to Frankfurt, Ponti began six years of studies with Erich Flinsch (1905-90), an assistant in Vienna to Emil von Sauer, himself a celebrated pupil of Liszt. Flinsch set about turning Ponti into a concert pianist, telling him ‘if you can’t play the Brahms-Paganini, Liszt Don Juan Fantasy, Schumann Toccata, Chopin études and late Beethoven sonatas by the time you’re twenty it’s time you found another profession’. Ponti rose to the challenge. ‘I practiced day and night until I could play them. The result was, among other things, a big technique.’

He had made his first recordings in 1961 (a 45 rpm disc of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau and Alborado del gracioso for the Christophorus label followed by an LP of Schubert’s Wander Fantasy and Beethoven’s Eroica Variations), but his international career was launched only after winning first prize in the 1964 Busoni Competition, making his debut in Vienna with five performances of Bartok’s Piano Concerto No.2 conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch. Then in 1968 came the call from Vox. His first album for the label, in September 1968, was of Moscheles’s Piano Concerto No.3 (with ten etudes from Opp.70 and 95 as fillers) followed the same month by Henselt’s finger-busting Concerto (with the difficult Op.2 études for side 2). More than fifty recordings followed.

Riding on the back of his new-found celebrity with Vox, Ponti made that New York debut in Tully Hall in January 1972. ‘I started off with Beethoven Op.2 No.1, then the Tchaikovsky G major sonata, the three hardest Rachmaninov preludes including the big E minor, both books of Brahms-Paganini, the Scriabin G sharp minor sonata, Petrushka and then nine encores. I asked the audience to choose any one from a list of 54. I ended with Scriabin’s 5^th Sonata. It was midnight by the time we had all had enough.’                 

Ponti’s repertoire was far wider than the concerto recordings for which he is best known, embracing Scarlatti and all the Beethoven sonatas (‘I’ve played the complete 32  sonatas four times in Frankfurt’) through to Ravel and Iain Hamilton who wrote his Sonata for Ponti (1976). Seven discs of live unedited performances issued on the defunct Dante label contain music by Haydn, Mussorgsky, Brahms, Schumann, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin and Rachmaninov. Recordings on the Lys label with the Ponti-Zimansky-Polasek Trio have works by Dvořák, Brahms, Mozart, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn. For the Accord label in 1997 the trio set down the two piano trios by Saint-Saëns. For Deutsche Grammophon he accompanied Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in an LP of songs by Charles Ives. He recorded Liszt and Brahms solo works for Naxos and Kuhlau’s Concerto (with his own bravura cadenza) for Unicorn-Kanchana. His own first choice is a private recording of him in Brahms 2 (‘my all-time favourite concerto – and always will be’) and the Khachaturian concerto with the Sydney Orchestra. They are indeed stunning performances. There are another roughly fifty CDs of live recitals waiting for some adventurous label to issue.

I was lucky enough to meet and interview Michael Ponti several times, the first in 1979, later in his home in Eschenlohe near Garmisch (Bavaria) with his beautiful wife Beike, the last exactly three years ago in Innsbruck when his son Max gathered together some of his father's friends to make a filmed tribute to him.

RIP Michael and thanks - you fought a good fight these last years and you have left the world a better place.