Luis Batlle, piano

Uruguayan-born pianist Luis Batlle was a student of Rudolf Serkin and was an annual participant at the Marlboro Music Festival starting in 1956. Among his students are Peter Serkin, Cecile Licad and Ignat Solzhenitsyn. His chamber music collaborators have included Pina Carmirelli, Miriam Fried, Jaime Laredo, Shmuel Ashkenasi and Harold Wright.

Luis Batlle Ibáí±ez was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1930. His first years of piano studies were with Victoria Schenini, William Kolischer. In 1951 he won the prize awarded by the Chopin Foundation, which allowed him to conduct advanced studies in Paris for three years with Nat Ives.

In 1956 he moved to the United States, where he heard the renowned pianist Rudolf Serkin and was invited to attend the Marlboro Music Festival. Nearly every year after, Batlle would travel from his home in Uruguay to the small New England town to participate in the festival. His annual migration from Uruguay ended in 1978 when he permanently moved to the United States to co-direct Serkin's Institute for Young Performing Musicians in Guilford and teach part-time at Boston University. He also taught for more than two decades at Marlboro College.