Back in the day when the big labels recorded standard repertoire and not much else, Michael Ponti was like a seismic disturbance.

Now the volcano has gone quiet. Ponti died on Monday at the age of 84.

Sure, Ponti recorded Beethoven and Scarlatti and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. But he will always be dearest to my heart for the material he exhumed for his groundbreaking, barnstorming Romantic Piano Concerto series on Vox.

Predating by decades a similar venture on the Hyperion label, Ponti showed what he was made of, in a time before digital trickery. AND he did it all himself. (The Hyperion series draws on a bullpen of capable pianists.)

The orchestras that accompanied him could be a little rough-and-ready, but often, in its way, this just made the recordings all the more thrilling. In at least one of the concertos, Ponti, caught up in his own bravura, starts doubling the orchestra and adds a flourish or two to the coda. I still return to the series (reissued as seven double-compact discs), with my personal favorites including piano concertos by Anton Rubinstein, Josef Rheinberger, Christian Sinding, Joachim Raff, and Sergei Lyapunov. Also on Vox, Ponti broke more than a few lances for the solo piano works of Carl Tausig and Charles-Valentin Alkan.

Somehow, he was never picked up by a major label – a rare exception being a recording he made with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau of the songs of Charles Ives for Deutsche Grammophon – but he did enjoy an active career, especially in Europe. He appeared with such conductors as Sir Georg Solti, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Kirill Kondrashin, and Kurt Masur, and performed in some of the world’s great concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and the Teatro Colón.

He also formed, with violinist Robert Zimansky and cellist Jan Polasek, the Ponti-Zymansky-Polasek Trio (from a marketing standpoint, perhaps not the catchiest name).

In his 60s, calamity struck, when he suffered a massive stroke. But he was able to revive his career somewhat by drawing from the vast catalogue of music composed for the left hand.

In all, he made over 80 recordings, most of them for Vox. For some reason, perhaps because he was recorded on smaller labels, often paired with minor league orchestras, he was often overlooked in surveys of important pianists. He is conspicuously absent, for instance, from New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg’s bestseller “The Great Pianists.”

Ponti was also a baseball fanatic, who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport. I saw a picture of him being interviewed later in life, and there are baseball books stacked all the way up the side of his couch. This obituary does a great job of a putting a human face on a super-virtuoso.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/washingtonpost/name/michael-ponti-obituary?id=36842554

It’s a shame Hyperion Records wasn’t around in the ‘60s and ‘70s, because Ponti could eat fire with the best of them. He played with greater Romantic temperament than most of the pianists in the latter’s Romantic Piano Concerto series (again, no relation to the Vox set).

Admittedly, Ponti’s recordings weren’t always as polished as those in the top tier. I get the impression that, unlike with the majors, there was no room in the budget for retakes or first-class orchestras. These days, when even the most modest professional orchestras are crammed with hungry graduates of the world’s top conservatories, Ponti would mop the floor with much of the competition. He had talent and exuberance to burn.

Michael Ponti talks to David Dubal, now host of WWFM – The Classical Network’s “The Piano Matters”

Josef Rheinberger, Piano Concerto in A-flat major

Joachim Raff, Piano Concerto in C minor

IN CONCERT: Franz Liszt, “12 Transcendental Etudes”