As is the case with so many of yesterday’s great performing musicians, the survival of the playing of the once vastly admired Dutch pianist Egon Petri (1881-1962) has been assured by the reissue of some of his many recordings and by their easy availability, in the past on LP and now on CD. In the 1970s, there was an EMI release in Japan¹ of several of Petri’s many 78-RPM pre-World War II commercial recordings, most of them originally issued on the English Columbia label and then released in due course on American Columbia.² In the early 1950s, Petri recorded the Beethoven “Hammerklavier” Sonata for American Columbia; later in the 1950s, he also made several LP recordings for Westminster, including one of the monumental Fantasia Contrappuntistica³ of Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), the Italo-German pianist-composer and Petri’s revered teacher. Finally, a small handful of Petri’s students and admirers were able, with touching dedication, to arrange for the LP issue in the 1970s and 1980s of a number of live performances, including the “Hammerklavier,”⁴ from the very last years of his life. 

Petri was a remarkable man, both as a wit and as an artist.

Now Pearl, the invaluable English label which has managed to make available excellent transfers of countless treasures of pre-World War II 78-RPM recordings, has brought out two Petri CDs, with the promise of more to come. The first to appear (in 1989) was a disc containing Petri commercial