Seymour Lipkin, piano

A student of Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski at the Curtis Institute of Music, Seymour Lipkin won the prestigious Rachmaninoff Competition at age 19. He went on to appear with all of America"s "top five" orchestras:  The New York Philharmonic (several times), the Boston Symphony (repeatedly), the Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago, as well as many other major American ensembles. Conductors with whom he has collaborated include Serge Koussevitzky, Fritz Reiner, Charles Munch, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Willian Steinberg, George Szell, and Christopher von Dohnanyi, and more recently with Kenneth Schermerhorn, Gerard Schwarz and George Cleve. Extremely active in chamber music, Mr. Lipkin has performed at the Marlboro festival, the Spoleto festivals (both in Italy and the US) and the Norfolk Festival. As a soloist he has earned particular acclaim for his Beethoven cycles, which have encompassed not only the five concertos and the thirty-two piano sonatas, but the ten violin sonatas and the five cello sonatas as well. Recently he has performed a cycle of the complete piano sonatas of Schubert. Mr. Lipkin is currently the Artistic Director of the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, and is on the faculties of both the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music.