Concert Peter Serkin recital (piano) World famous Mariinsky Ballet and Opera Theatre - Opera and Concert Hall
Schedule for Peter Serkin recital (piano) 2022
Piano: Peter Serkin
Orchestra: Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra
Peter Serkin was born in New York City and is the son of pianist Rudolf
Serkin, and grandson of the influential violinist Adolf Busch, whose daughter
Irene had married Rudolf Serkin. Peter was given the middle name Adolf in honor
of his grandfather.
In 1958, at the age of 11, Serkin began studying at the Curtis Institute of
Music where his teachers included the Polish pianist Mieczysіaw Horszowski, the
American virtuoso Lee Luvisi, as well as his own father. He graduated in 1965.
He also studied with Ernst Oster, flutist Marcel Moyse, and Karl Ulrich
Schnabel.
His concert career began in 1959, when he first performed at the Marlboro
Music Festival, a seminal agent and incubator of chamber music performance in
the U.S., established in 1951 by the elder Serkin, Hermann and Adolf Busch,
along with Marcel, Blanche and Louis Moyse. Following that performance, Peter
Serkin was invited to play with major orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra
under George Szell and the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy.
In
1966, at the age of 19, Serkin was awarded the Grammy Award for Best New
Classical Artist|Most Promising New Classical Recording Artist. Three of his
recordings have won Grammy nominations (one of them features six Mozart
concertos; the two others feature the music of Olivier Messiaen) and his
recordings have won other awards. Serkin was the first pianist to receive the
Premio Internazionale Musicale Chigiana award and he received an honorary
doctorate from the New England Conservatory of Music in 2001.
In 1968, shortly after marrying and becoming a father, Peter Serkin decided
to stop playing music altogether. In the winter of 1971, he, his wife, and baby
daughter Karina moved to a small rural town in Mexico. About eight months later,
on a Sunday morning, Serkin heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach being
broadcast over the radio from a neighbour's house. As he listened, he says, "It
became clear to me that I should play." He returned to the U.S. and began his
musical career anew.
Since then, Serkin has performed around the world with leading orchestras and
such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Pierre
Boulez, Simon Rattle, James Levine, and Christoph Eschenbach. He has made
numerous recordings, on such labels as RCA Victor, featuring music from Bach
(including four recordings of the Goldberg Variations - the first made when he
was 18, the fourth when he was 47), Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms,
and Dvorak as well as numerous more recent composers such as Reger, Berg,
Webern, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Takemitsu, Oliver Knussen, Peter Lieberson, Stefan
Wolpe and Charles Wuorinen.
Serkin is a committed performer of new and recent music, having premiered or
been the dedicatee of many new works by such composers as Takemitsu, Lieberson,
Knussen, Wuorinen and Elliott Carter. The American composer Ned Rorem writes of
Serkin, "His uniqueness lies, as I hear it, in a friendly rather than over-awed
approach to the classics, which nonetheless plays with the care and brio that is
in the family blood, and he's not afraid to be ugly. He approaches contemporary
music with the same depth as he does the classics, and he is unique among the
superstars in that he approaches it at all."
Among prominent virtuosi, Peter Serkin was one of the first to experiment
with period fortepianos, and the first to record late Beethoven sonatas on
pianos of both the modern as well as Beethoven's era.
Serkin has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Andrбs
Schiff, Alexander Schneider, Pamela Frank, Harold Wright, the Guarneri Quartet,
the Budapest Quartet, and other prominent musicians and ensembles, such as
principal wind players of major American orchestras. In addition, he is one of
the founding members of TASHI and has recorded for a variety of labels. He has
taught at the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music and currently
is on faculty at the Bard College Conservatory of Music as well as other
institutions. Among those who have studied piano with him are Orit Wolf, Simone
Dinnerstein, and Cecile Licad.
He has five children and two grandchildren and lives in Massachusetts with
his wife Regina.
Schedule for Peter Serkin recital (piano) 2022
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