In 1913 he undertook musical studies at the Conservatoire de Paris under teachers André Gedalge and Eugène Cools, from whom he learned counterpoint and fugue, before taking up composition studies with Charles Koechlin, who had taught such diverse musicians as Faure, Poulenc, Milhaud, members of Les Six, and Cole Porter.
Salle Pleyel | Pleyel | Pleyel et Cie | Chopin's Pleyel piano in Cell No. 4 in Valldemossa Charterhouse |
Between 2005 to 2010, on the occasion of Frédéric Chopin's bicentennial, he performed the complete works of the composer in Budapest, and in parallel prepared the complete CD-recordings of his works on Pleyel pianos for the Hungarian Hungaroton Label.
Now the home of the seventh and eighth generation of the family, author Anne Butler and her daughter Chase Poindexter, Butler Greenwood is a simple, raised cottage-style plantation home filled with oil portraits, Brussels carpet, gilded pier mirrors, Mallard poster beds, fine china and silverware, a French Pleyel grand piano, and the area’s finest original Victorian formal parlor, its twelve matching pieces still in the original upholstery.
In subsequent years, it alternated between the Gaumont Palace Cinema in Toulon, the Salle Pleyel in Paris, Port Grimaud near St-Tropez, the Centre Culturel de Châteauvallon near Toulon, the Opéra Municipal de Toulon, and finally, since its construction in 1991, the Palais Neptune at the Palais des Congrès de Toulon.
Here he became a partner in Pleyel's Fortepiano Factory, which by the of time Kalkbrenner’s death (1849) had risen to a place second only to Erard in prestige and output.
Pleyel's fame even reached the then-remote musical regions of America: there was a Pleyel Society on the island of Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts, and tunes by Pleyel made their way into the then-popular shape note hymnals.
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Pleyel was brought before the Committee of Public Safety a total of seven times due to the following: his foreign status, his recent purchase of a château, and his ties with the Strasbourg Cathedral.
Oscar Peterson et Joe Pass à Salle Pleyel is a 1975 (see 1975 in music) live album by Oscar Peterson, featuring Joe Pass.
In the 1980s, the Pleyel company bought out the Erard and Gaveau piano companies which also manufactured pianos in France.
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In 1913, Pleyel built the "Jungle Piano" for use by Albert Schweitzer in his hospital in Lambaréné (French Equatorial Africa – now Gabon).