Preserver of piano recordings, Gregor Benko has died

Gregor Benko, a self-taught collector-historian who spent six decades tracking down lost recordings of the great Romantic-era pianists, died August 12 in Syracuse, NY. He was 82.

Benko co-founded the International Piano Library in Ohio in the mid-1960s, with Albert Petrak, while still a teenager. The organization was built around a single goal: finding recordings of pianists whose artistry was disappearing along with the shellac and cylinders they’d been captured on. He installed well known pianist Alicia de Larrocha as president and ran the operation himself for the next two decades.

His main obsession was Josef Hofmann. Benko spent more than thirty years chasing down alternate takes, private discs, and off-air broadcasts of the Polish virtuoso, eventually producing, with fellow archivist Ward Marston, a multi-volume “Complete Josef Hofmann” series. He did similar work on a set of Julius Block’s Edison cylinders recorded between 1889 and 1927. He captured pianists from an era when interpretation of classical works, rather than clean adherence to the composer’s work as published was an expectation, so every recorded performance preserved was another eye on the work.

Benko’s best-known rescue wasn’t a recording but a person. He tracked down Ervin Nyiregyházi, a once-celebrated Hungarian pianist who had drifted into obscurity working odd jobs, and talked him back into a recording studio, restarting his career.

In 1977 Benko donated his library’s holdings to the University of Maryland, forming the core of what’s now the International Piano Archives at Maryland, though he kept a separate New York archive running under nearly the same name for years afterward. The American Liszt Society gave him its medal in 2017, citing his “priceless contribution to preserving the aural and documentary history of piano performance.”

Benko’s beat was classical, not jazz, but the instinct was the same one every serious 78 collector recognizes, that a stack of forgotten shellac might hold something irreplaceable, and somebody had better find it before it ends up in a landfill.