Biography

Alexis Weissenberg was born on July 26, 1929 in Sofia, Bulgaria. He was an actor, known for The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story (2015) and Klavierkonzert Nr. 1 in b-moll von Peter I. Tschaikowsky (1967). He died on January 8, 2012 in Lugano, Switzerland.

He appeared as a soloist with the world's leading orchestras, played recitals on famous stages, and made many recordings. He was a Romantic specialist, most closely associated with Schumann, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff.

After the war, he moved to New York, where he studied at the Juilliard School.

In 1941, after Bulgaria allied itself with the Axis powers, he and his mother, who were Jewish, attempted to cross into Turkey using false documents. They were detained for several months at a concentration camp on the border. With the aid of a sympathetic German officer, who loved the Schubert that "Sigi" played on an accordion, they were able to escape. They made their way to Istanbul and eventually to Palestine.

[1983 interview with The Globe and Mail of Canada, regarding his unemotional stage demeanor] You cannot lose your control physically and be precise as to what your hands do. Can you imagine a surgeon operating on somebody, and swooning and looking up at the ceiling and being very excited about it? The patient would die. That is what happens in music too. The patient dies, because there's too much going on besides the actual performance.