Stephen Kovacevich - a pianist who risked oblivion to know what it’s like out on the edge

The death of Stephen Kovacevich, aged 86, was announced yesterday. Tom Service pays tribute to a pianist whose performances were full of beauty, clarity – and danger And, here, in a piece published on Kovacevich’s 75th birthday , Andrew Clements picks his favourite recordings. It was just a couple of weeks ago that Stephen Kovacevich and I were last in contact.

He was in hospital, recovering from a hip operation, and we were talking about Hiromi , and where the latest generation of pianists were coming from. The players who had the brilliance, fire and commitment to the moment that his favourite players had: Vladimir Horowitz, Sergei Rachmaninov – his greatest of the greats – and his friend and occasional mentee, Yuja Wang. Among other things, he told me about a Charles Munch performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique he had discovered on YouTube that made him exclaim: “How the…