YSM appoints Peter Serkin Visiting Professor of Piano
School of Music Dean Robert Blocker recently shared with the YSM community news that pianist Peter Serkin will join the faculty for the 2018-2019 academic year. Below is Dean Blocker's enthusiastic announcement.
I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Peter Serkin as Visiting Professor of Piano for the 2018-2019 academic year.
A pianist of prodigious gifts and insights, Mr. Serkin began concertizing with America’s renowned orchestras and conductors at age 12, and his internationally celebrated career in the ensuing years has taken him to all corners of the globe. We are fortunate that his calendar permits him to be at Yale during our search for a senior piano professor.
Peter Serkin began his musical studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, where his teachers included the Polish pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski and the American virtuoso Lee Luvisi, as well as his father, Rudolf Serkin. He graduated in 1965 and the next year, at age 19, was the recipient of the Grammy Award in the Most Promising New Classical Recording Artist category (the award category later named Best New Classical Artist). Three of his recordings have earned Grammy nominations (one of them features six Mozart concerti, and the other two feature the music of Olivier Messiaen) along with other awards. Serkin was the first pianist to receive the Premio Internazionale Musicale Chigiana award, and in 2001, the New England Conservatory presented him with an honorary doctorate degree.
His extensive repertoire and discography reflect a commitment to and advocacy of the music of our time. Along with his musical and intellectual insights into the work of J.S. Bach (four recordings of the “Goldberg" Variations – the first at age 18), Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Chopin, and Dvorak, he has also explored the music of such composers as Reger, Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Takemitsu, Oliver Knussen, Peter Lieberson, Stefan Wolpe, Elliott Carter, and Charles Wuorinen. Among prominent virtuosi, Peter Serkin was one of the first to experiment with period fortepianos, and the first to record late Beethoven sonatas on modern pianos and instruments of Beethoven’s era. He has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Pamela Frank, Andras Schiff, the Budapest Quartet, the Guarneri Quartet, and many other leading artists and orchestras. He is a founding member of TASHI (known later as the Tashi Quartet) and records for a variety of labels. Mr. Serkin teaches master classes throughout the world and has taught at such leading institutions as the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School. He presently teaches at the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
I am delighted that he will join Professor Boris Berman and the YSM piano faculty as a mentor and teacher to our gifted piano students. We look forward to the artistic and intellectual contributions Peter will make to the School of Music and to Yale in the year ahead.
Warmest regards,
Robert Blocker
The Henry and Lucy Moses Dean of Music
Yale School of Music
