Bloch was a teacher at Julliard for more than 40 years. He died recently, and today's Wall Street Journal had an appreciation penned by Stuart Isacoff. Among other things, the essay mentions Bloch's love of Lagavulin, his plan to organize Liszt's repertoire by mistress, and his love of so many different styles of piano music:

The introduction of unusual repertoire was one of his major accomplishments at Juilliard -- not just very early music, but Mozart concertos (at a time when few of them were being performed in the concert halls), and piano works of then-relatively unknown composers such as Alexander Scriabin and Charles-Valentin Alkan. "I had this fascination with [Ferruccio] Busoni and [Adolf von] Henselt," remembers pianist Sara Davis Buechner, who now teaches at the University of British Columbia. "No one else cared. But with him I had a sense that here was someone who loved the vast range of keyboard literature with every fiber of his being, and he wanted you to love it too. Of the several things he gave me over the years, the most treasured was his Harvard monograph on Alkan. He signed it with the date, hour, minute and second, and a large crescendo. He said the crescendo was to indicate an ever-growing friendship. He actually signed it three times over the years -- and each time the crescendo was bigger."

[An aside: if you are in the mood to listen to a gorgeous thunderstorm a la keyboard, may I recommend Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano? It's one of my own go-to pieces when the world is too much with me (not that I actually agree with Wordsworth, for the most part. The first two lines are fan-freaking-tastic, the next 7.5 are okay, and then he totally loses me).]