MASTERCLASS WITH
JEROME LOWENTHAL

JEROME LOWENTHAL, born in 1932, continues to fascinate audiences, who find in his playing a youthful intensity and an eloquence born of life-experience. He is a virtuoso of the fingers and the emotions.

Mr. Lowenthal studied in his native Philadelphia with Olga Samaroff-Stokowski, in New York with William Kapell and Edward Steuermann, and in Paris with Alfred Cortot, meanwhile traveling annually to Los Angeles for coachings with Artur Rubinstein. After winning prizes in three international competitions (Bolzano, Darmstadt, and Brussels), he moved to Jerusalem where, for three years, he played, taught and lectured.

Returning to America, he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic playing Bartok’s Concerto No. 2 in 1963. Since then, he has performed more-or-less everywhere, from the Aleutians to Zagreb. Conductors with whom he has appeared as soloist include Barenboim, Ozawa, Tilson Thomas, Temirkanov, and Slatkin, as well as such giants of the past as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux and Leopold Stokowski.

In chamber music he has participated in innumerable festivals and has performed piano duets with his late wife Ronit Amir and his daughter Carmel Lowenthal. He has adjudicated in most of the world’s great piano competitions, including Leeds, Cliburn, Rubinstein, Horowitz, Cleveland, Young Concert Artists and Beijing. His recorded repertoire is vast and includes the complete Annees de Pelerinage of Liszt, the complete concerti of Tchaikowsky, the Beethoven Fourth Concerto with eleven different cadenzas, the Gershwin Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue, Ned Rorem’s Concerto No. 3 (written for him), Liszt Concerti, and solo discs of the music of George Rochberg and Christian Sinding, as well as two-piano and four-hand music (Messiaen, Debussy, Rzewski and Corigliano) with his partner, Ursula Oppens.

Teaching, too, is an essential part of Mr. Lowenthal’s life. Last year he completed fifty summers at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. This year is his thirtieth on the faculty of The Juilliard School, and he regularly joins the summer festivals of Pianofest in the Hamptons, Beijing (BIMFA), Perugia, Amalfi, Uelzen, Tampa (Rebecca Penneys) and Northern Colorado. He has worked with an extraordinary number of gifted pianists, whom he encourages to understand the music they play in a wide aesthetic and cultural perspective and to project it with the freedom which that perspective allows.