For keyboard aficionados the joint recitals given in recent years at the Wigmore Hall in London by the pianists Stephen Kovacevich and Martha Argerich were unmissable events. Celebrating milestone birthdays of Kovacevich, who has died aged 86, they provided timely reminders that his questing spirit never ceased in its search for inner truth.
Early in his career he forged a style characterised by the interaction of titanic energy and hard-won serenity. Nowhere was this more in evidence than in his second recording of Beethoven’s 33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, made for Onyx in 2008 (he had previously made a fine recording for Philips in 1968). There he traverses the whole spectrum of human experience. One minute the listener is battered with thunderous eruptions of terrifying power, the next beguiled by inward-looking meditation, charm or humour.
The Diabellis featured in his triumphant 1961 Wigmore debut: an early signal of an outstanding talent, displayed again in a repeat performance at the Royal Festival Hall. In 1959 he had moved from his native California to London to study with Myra Hess, whom he was to describe as one of the greatest influences on his life.
Looking back on this period in later years, he said that he had consciously avoided the traditional career path via competitions, lacking the stomach or stamina: if there had been 95 competitors, he joked, he would have come 96th.
In 1968 he was taken on by Philips, who over a period of 15 years issued performances of concertos by Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Bartók, Grieg, Schumann and Richard Rodney Bennett (dedicated to him). The two Brahms concertos, with Wolfgang Sawallisch (1992 and 1994), regal in authority yet profoundly searching, rapidly became a benchmark recording. Brahms’s solo piano music was revisited often throughout his career.
Demonstrating a deep affinity too with Schubert, he recorded only selected sonatas, but those included classic recordings of D960 in B flat for both Hyperion and EMI, emphasising its existential anxiety rather than any peaceful acceptance, and of D959 in A major (EMI).
His approach to Beethoven was notable for his explosive, fiercely articulated playing, pushing to expressive extremes, as characterised in the sonatas he recorded for Philips. When he came to record the entire cycle for EMI, beginning in the early 1990s, his readings were still energised and dramatic, but the early and middle-period works were especially admired for their structural clarity, the later sonatas for their more exploratory quality.
He was particularly pleased with the recording of the second Bartók concerto (1977), not simply because of his mastery of its fearsome technical difficulties, but because the release of pent-up violence allowed him to free himself of all restraint. The testing of boundaries between control and abandon, between reality and oblivion, remained a constant aspiration.
He was not generally a specialist in contemporary music, but from his fellow-expatriate and tennis partner, Stephen Montague, he commissioned a solo piano work, Southern Lament, that he performed at the Cheltenham festival and BBC Proms in 1997.
In 1984 he launched a parallel career as a conductor, chiefly with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. In 1990 he was appointed artistic director and principal conductor of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, in the same year making his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, conducting two Mozart programmes from the piano.
In the last quarter century of his career he was toying with the idea of adding the Rachmaninov concertos and Paganini Rhapsody (all of which he had learned) to his performing repertory, as well as Chopin mazurkas, nocturnes, waltzes and the Second Sonata. Most of these projects remained unrealised, though his last recording for EMI (2006) paired Chopin waltzes with Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, and a few of the mazurkas were slipped into occasional recital programmes.
Neither Chopin nor Ravel had hitherto loomed large in his repertory, yet his approach to their harmonic surprises and textural subtleties betokened an enhanced appreciation of the power of music to engage a sense of wonder, to conduct the listener into a sphere of transcendence. A recording still to come is of two works by Tōru Takemitsu with the violinist Sayaka Shoji in her collection Shadows, to be released in January.
Born in San Pedro, Los Angeles, Stephen was the son of an American mother, Loreta (nee Zuban), and a Croatian father, Nicholas Kovacevich. His surname was changed to Bishop when his mother remarried, but he later reclaimed his Croatian heritage by changing it to Bishop-Kovacevich, eventually styling himself Stephen Kovacevich.
He studied initially with Lev Schorr and made his debut at the age of 11, playing the Concertino by Jean Françaix; in the same year he also gave a solo recital.
The 1961 Wigmore debut included not just the Diabelli Variations but also the Sonata by Berg and three preludes and fugues by Bach. In the early 60s he formed a brief musical (and romantic) partnership with Jacqueline du Pré, which eventuated in some fine studio broadcasts and an acclaimed Warner Classics release of Beethoven’s third and fifth cello sonatas.
In 1967 he made his New York debut, and subsequently toured the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and the far east.
Kovacevich spoke freely of the stroke he suffered in his late 60s that caused him temporarily to lose the power of speech; he also had to rebuild his technique. He spoke too of the crippling stage nerves that beset him throughout his career, which he latterly succeeded in partly conquering. Those two experiences doubtless contributed to the volatility and vulnerability that lay just below the surface of the genial charm he radiated.
Resident in Hampstead, north London, for the latter period of his life, Stephen was known to colleagues as an amiable presence in the musical community – he was a generous supporter of a local festival that I directed at the time – and indeed further afield. He enjoyed making music with talented young performers, proved an entertaining, strongly opinionated drinking companion and was a keen tennis, snooker and chess player.
In 1961 he married Bernardine Wall, and they had two sons, Matt and Foff (Francis). A novelist and psychotherapist, she retained the name Bernardine Bishop after their divorce in 1967. In the 70s he had a relationship with Argerich, and they had a daughter, Stéphanie. In the mid-80s he had a relationship with Basia Janowska, an artist and illustrator, and they had a son, Milan. He is survived by his children.
• Stephen Kovacevich, pianist, born 17 October 1940; died 27 October 2026
