PFOHL, FERDINAND (1862–1949)

Artistic depth, technical superiority and a remarkable sense of tonal colour are the trademarks of the young German pianist Jamina Gerl. Competition triumphs and increasing concert engagements took her to prestigious venues across the world such as the Steinway Hall and Carnegie Hall in New York, the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, Kammermusiksaal Beethoven-Haus, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Seattle, Sichuan Conservatory of Music Concert Hall and Munetsugu Hall, Nagoya. She has appeared on radio and TV recordings produced in cooperation with MDR, WDR, Dlf and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

Ferdinand Pfohl was renowned chiefly as a music writer, particularly for his long years spent as music critic for the Hamburger Nachrichten (‘Hamburg News’). However, he never lost his passion for composition, which he had first felt as a young man. Pfohl was born in 1862, spent his musical childhood and schooldays in the Bohemian town of Loket on the river Ohře (Elbogen an der Eger, in German) and after taking his Abitur (school leaving exams) at the Benedictine grammar school in Broumov (Braunau) in northern Bohemia, was set to have had a ‘solid grounding in classical education’. He was initially persuaded by his father to begin studying law in Prague, in 1881, but shortly afterwards he appears to have undergone a kind of epiphany. At the first performance of Parsifal in Bayreuth after Wagner’s death in 1883 Pfohl heard ‘a distant voice’ speak to him in a moment of high emotion ‘You belong to music, to music and music alone, and music belongs to you: it is your lifeblood, your soul…’