Malcolm Frager

Malcolm Frager (15 January 1935 – 20 June 1991) was an American pianist.

Frager was born in St. Louis, Missouri and studied with Carl Friedberg in New York City from 1949 until Friedberg's death in 1955. In 1957 he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University with a major in Russian. He won the Piano Competition in Geneva (1955), the Michaels Memorial Award in Chicago (1956), the Leventritt Competition in New York (1959), and the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels (1960). His Grammy-nominated debut recording with RCA Victor Red Seal was Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16 and Haydn's Sonata No. 35 in E-flat. He recorded music by Mozart, Haydn, Chopin, Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms and Prokofiev. Frager regularly programmed the two piano concertos and numerous solo works by Carl Maria von Weber, as well as the keyboard compositions of C. P. E. Bach.

Frager's personal library is now housed at the Sibley Library Special Collections at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. His discovery of manuscripts includes a version of the Fantasie in A minor that later became the first movement of the Piano Concerto in A minor by Robert Schumann. He premiered this with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf at the Tanglewood Festival in August 1968. In 1978 Frager visited the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, Poland where he persuaded librarians to make available a cache of more than one thousand original manuscripts missing (and believed lost) since World War II. The collection included pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Mozart. In 1987 Frager received the Golden Mozart Pin from the International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg. He died in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on June 20, 1991. Mr. Frager's family was originally Jewish. Mr. Frager was a Christian Scientist. His family declined to state the cause of death, but he was reported to have been ill for about a year.