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Joseph Bloch, Guide to Juilliard Pianists, Dies at 91

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The pianist confronts an embarrassment of riches. To a performer embarking on a concert career, five centuries of keyboard music beckon, with every phrase of every prelude and fugue, every sonata and partita, mazurka and minuet, impromptu and intermezzo, rhapsody and fantasy and scherzo and concerto the hundreds of thousands of pieces the repertory comprises open to an array of possible interpretations.

Joseph Bloch, who toured as well as taught, in the 1980s. To this vast storehouse of ebony-and-ivory treasures, Joseph Bloch was a learned guide for thousands of young pianists, many now among the finest alive. And though he indelibly shaped world-famous performers for nearly half a century, Mr. Bloch did so almost entirely without giving private lessons.

Mr. Bloch, who died on March 4 at 91, was a professor of piano literature at the Juilliard School in New York. His death, at his home in Larchmont, N.Y., was of a heart attack, his family said.

For five decades (with an interruption in the 1980s when he tried to retire but proved indispensable and was persuaded to return), every Juilliard pianist passed through Mr. Blochs classroom. His pupils included many of the best-known performers of the second half of the 20th century, among them Van Cliburn, Emanuel Ax, Garrick Ohlsson, Misha Dichter, Jeffrey Siegel and Jeffrey Swann.

I went through the undergrad, grad and doctoral-level courses here, so I took just about every course he taught, Yoheved Kaplinsky, the current chairwoman of Juilliards piano department, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. Many, many other pianists, even though he didnt teach them privately, felt that he had an immeasurable impact on their musical knowledge and their musical scope.

A pianist trained as a musicologist, Mr. Bloch did not teach his students prowess at the keyboard; that was done by the conservatorys studio teachers, eminent pianists like Rosina Lhvinne and Adele Marcus. What he taught was not so much the how-to of pianism but the who, the why and the what-if.

For undergraduates, Mr. Bloch taught a required two-year survey of the piano repertory. For graduate students, he taught a series of classes on concentrated topics: a year plumbing the Haydn sonatas, the Chopin mazurkas or the Mozart concertos.

With fresh-faced pupils seated in rows, Mr. Blochs classroom could pass for one in a traditional university, except for the Steinway or two at the front of the room. There, students took turns performing the days assignments.

I remember we did Frescobaldi, and Id never heard of Frescobaldi, Louis Nagel, a professor of piano at the University of Michigan who trained at Juilliard, said. Most of us played that narrow band of repertoire from Bach to the 20th century, so we didnt know this at all. (The Frescobaldi toccata from 1635 that Mr. Nagel prepared for class that day opens his 1995 CD Four Centuries of J. S. Bach, on the Equilibrium label.)

Though Mr. Bloch adored the obscure favorite composers included Girolamo Diruta, from the 16th century, and Charles-Valentin Alkan, from the 19th he did not neglect the famous.

He could take a work that we all thought we knew so well, like the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven, and shock us by showing us what a revolutionary, unusual masterpiece it is and that Beethoven knew it, the pianist Mr. Siegel recalled.

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