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Gary Graffman (born October 14, 1928 [1] [2] ) is an American classical pianist, teacher and administrator.
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Gary Graffman (born October 14, 1928 [1] [2] ) is an American classical pianist, teacher and administrator.
Graffman was born in New York City [1] to Russian-Jewish parents. Having started piano at age 3, Graffman entered the Curtis Institute of Music at age 7 in 1936 as a piano student of Isabelle Vengerova. [1] After graduating from Curtis in 1946, he made his professional solo debut with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. [2] From 1946 to 1948, he studied at Columbia University. In 1949, Graffman won the Leventritt Competition. He then furthered his piano studies with Rudolf Serkin at the Marlboro Music Festival and informally with Vladimir Horowitz. In 1954, he returned to Columbia to perform Edward MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2 under Leopold Stokowski at the university's bicentennial concert. [3]
Upon graduation he played with numerous orchestras and performed concerts and recitals internationally. Over the next three decades, he toured and recorded extensively, performing solo and with orchestras around the globe. He revived the Tchaikovsky 2nd and 3rd Piano Concertos, recorded by CBS with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and several of his students play these works. In 1964, he recorded Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. He also made a classic recording of Sergei Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1966; it was reissued on CD as part of Sony Classical's "Great Performances" series in 2006. In the 1970s, Graffman appeared with the Guarneri Quartet and the Juilliard String Quartet in performances of chamber music. [2]
Probably Graffman's best known recorded performance was for the soundtrack of the 1979 Woody Allen movie Manhattan in which he played George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue , accompanied by the New York Philharmonic. Portions of the Philharmonic/Graffman version have been featured countless times in TV and movies over the last quarter century.
In 1977, he sprained the ring finger of his right hand. Because of this injury he began re-fingering some passages for that hand in such a way as to avoid using the affected finger. This altered technique appeared to aggravate the problem, ultimately forcing him to stop performing with his right hand altogether by around 1979. Thereafter, Graffman pursued his other interests such as writing, photography, and Oriental art. In 1980, he joined the faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music, where his career had begun. He took over as the school's director in 1986, and added the title of President in 1995, serving in both capacities through May 2006. He has also served on the piano faculty of the Manhattan School of Music.
Graffman's finger sprain may have been a trigger for focal dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes loss of function and uncontrollable curling in the fingers. The pianist Leon Fleisher, a close friend of Graffman, also had the disorder. [4] [5]
Shortly after joining the Curtis faculty, he published a memoir, I Really Should Be Practicing.
In 1985 he gave the UK premiere of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Piano Concerto in C-sharp for the Left Hand. Paul Wittgenstein had commissioned the work in the 1920s and played it many times, but it later slipped from the repertoire. [6]
Seven left-hand works have been commissioned for Graffman. In 1993, for example, he performed the world premiere of Ned Rorem's Piano Concerto No. 4, written specifically for the left hand, and in 2001 he premiered Daron Hagen's concerto Seven Last Words. The American composer William Bolcom composed Gaea , a concerto for two pianos left hand for Graffman and Leon Fleisher. It received its first performance in Baltimore in April 1996. The concerto is constructed in such a way that it can be performed in one of three ways, with either piano part alone with reduced orchestra, or with both piano parts and the two reduced orchestras combined into a full orchestra.
Graffman has received honorary doctoral degrees, was honored by the cities of Philadelphia and New York, and received the Governor's Arts Award by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. His students include pianists Lydia Artymiw, Lang Lang, Yuja Wang, [7] Haochen Zhang and Szuyu Su. [8]
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born American conductor. One of the leading conductors of the early and mid-20th century, he is best known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was especially noted for his free-hand conducting style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from the orchestras he directed.
Eugene George Istomin was an American pianist. He was a winner of the Leventritt Award and recorded extensively as a soloist and in a piano trio in which he collaborated with Isaac Stern and Leonard Rose.
Leon Fleisher was an American classical pianist, conductor and pedagogue. He was one of the most renowned pianists and pedagogues in the world. Music correspondent Elijah Ho called him "one of the most refined and transcendent musicians the United States has ever produced".
Yefim "Fimi" Naumovich Bronfman is a Soviet-born Israeli-American pianist.
Rudolf Serkin was a Bohemian-born Austrian-American pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Beethoven interpreters of the 20th century.
Jerome Lowenthal is an American classical pianist. He has served as chair of the piano department at the Juilliard School in New York. Additionally, Lowenthal is on the faculty at Music Academy of the West in Montecito, California.
Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40, is a major work by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, completed in 1926. The work exists in three versions. Following its unsuccessful premiere, the composer made cuts and other amendments before publishing it in 1928. With continued lack of success, he withdrew the work, eventually revising and republishing it in 1941. The original manuscript version was released in 2000 by the Rachmaninoff Estate to be published and recorded. The work is dedicated to Nikolai Medtner, who in turn dedicated his Second Piano Concerto to Rachmaninoff the following year.
Ignat Aleksandrovich Solzhenitsyn is a Russian American conductor and pianist. He is the conductor laureate of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and the principal guest conductor of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. He is the son of Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Walter Hendl was an American conductor, composer and pianist.
Ivan Roy Davis, Jr. was an American classical pianist and longstanding member of the faculty at the University of Miami's Frost School of Music.
William Masselos was an American classical pianist.
Abram Chasins was an American composer, pianist, piano teacher, lecturer, musicologist, music broadcaster, radio executive and author.
Zhang Haochen is a Chinese pianist. He was a Gold Medalist of the 13th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2009, becoming one of the youngest winners in the history of the competition. Zhang received an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2017.
Yuja Wang is a Chinese pianist. Born in Beijing, she began learning piano there at age six, and went on to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Gaea, for Two Pianos Left Hand and Orchestra, also simply called Concerto for Two Pianos Left Hand, is a concert piece by the American composer William Bolcom, written for Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman.
Lorin Hollander is an American classical concert pianist. He has performed with virtually all of the major symphony orchestras in the United States and many around the world. A New York Times critic called him in 1964 "the leading pianist of his generation."
The Piano Concerto No. 4 for Left Hand and Orchestra is the fourth piano concerto by the American composer Ned Rorem. It was commissioned by the Curtis Institute of Music for the pianist Gary Graffman. The work was first performed by Graffman and the Curtis Institute of Music Orchestra conducted by André Previn at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, on February 4, 1993. Its New York City premiere was performed the next day by the same ensemble at Carnegie Hall. A then-unknown Hilary Hahn performed a solo violin section for both performances.
Max Wilcox (December 27, 1928 - January 20, 2017) was an American producer of classical music records, known for his relationship with pianist Arthur Rubinstein.
Stewart Goodyear (born February 1978) is a Canadian concert pianist and composer. He is best known for performing all 32 Beethoven sonatas in a single day, a feat he has done at Koerner Hall (Toronto), McCarter Theatre (Princeton), the Mondavi Center, the AT&T Performing Arts Center (Dallas), and Memorial Hall (Cincinnati).
Klaviermusik mit Orchester, Op. 29, is a 1923 piano concerto by Paul Hindemith. Subtitled Klavier nur linke Hand, it is a piano concerto for the left hand alone. It was commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the World War. He never played the piece, and when he died, his widow refused access to the score. The premiere, after her death, was played in Berlin in 2004, with Leon Fleisher as the soloist and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle. It was published by Schott.
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