[Draft in progress]

This is the beginning of a Wikipedia page I hope to do on my mother, the pianist Grace Nelson Weisert (1910-1978).

Her career meets the Wikipedia criteria — many published reviews of her performances in major newspapers, and even one (in a local paper) of her first public performance at 5 as well as her soloing with the Chicago Symphony (under Frederick Stock) at age 19.

Although all her Washington DC performances were tape-recorded from WGMS-FM (then the DC classical music station) broadcasts, so far only one has been retrievable, her January 12 1964 performance in the East Garden Court of the National Gallery of Art, including the world premiere of Leo Sowerby’s Sonata. For this I am grateful to the National Gallery archives and to an archivist who answered my recent email request in less than a day with downloadable links to the program and the recording. She also retrieved programs from the 1952 and 1958 recitals, but no recording existed. Archivists are among the best that humankind has to offer.

Sowerby was then the head of organ music for the Washington Cathedral and had been my mother’s friend and teacher in Chicago. She reconnected with him when we moved to Washington and he was very pleased that she would perform his sonata that had so far never been performed.

This is the program from the National Gallery:

You can listen to it here. The WGMS announcer introduces each piece.

Some time after the reviews came out, my brother Conrad Weisert wrote a background piece on how it came to be that my mother performed the sonata, but also on Sowerby’s reaction to the Washington Post review — by their second-string reviewer who confused a fugue for a toccata.

These are the reviews, first the one from the Evening Star:

And the Washington Post: