Paul Procopolis
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Paul Procopolis: non-existent classical pianist.
With the advent of cheap long-playing records, unscrupulous companies issued records of material under pseudonyms to avoid paying royalties or because they did not own the copyright to the recordings. In the case of Paul Procopolis, the reasons for the recording company (Saga) issuing recordings pseudonymously are unknown, as they would have had the copyright to at least some of the material.
The name Paul Procopolis was used to reissue recordings by the pianist Sergio Fiorentino, including the complete Chopin waltzes, as well as works by Liszt. Some of the LPs included a biography of Procopolis who, it was claimed, was born in Athens in 1934, studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and lived and taught in Greece. The biography was written by Robin O'Connor (see external links).
Ernst Lumpe has attempted to identify the real artists in the Procopolis recordings. Other pianists whose recordings were issued under this name included Bernard Vitebsky (his Beethoven concerto number 3), and Clive Lythgoe. The recording of the second Chopin concerto has been identified as that of the Argentinian pianist Carmen Vitis Adnet, who lived in Vienna and was married to pianist Hans Wolf with the Vienna Symphony under Hans Swarowsky. Further recordings (such as the first Chopin concerto) remain unidentified.
It seems likely that Marius Ubendorff and Auguste du Maurier are also pseudonyms for pianists the record companies did not wish to identify.
[edit] External links
- The Fiorentino recordings issued under the name of Procopolis are identified at Ernst Lumpe's website
- Robin O'Connor, the man who assembled many of the Paul Procopolis LPs recounts how they came into being on the
