Overview
Biography
Peter Adolf Serkin (July 24, 1947 – February 1, 2020) was an American classical pianist. He taught at the Curtis Institute of Music, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Bard College. He won two Grammy awards, Most Promising New Classical Recording Artist in 1966 and Best Chamber Music Performance (with Mstislav Rostropovich) in 1984, and he performed globally.
Early life[edit]
Peter Serkin was born on July 24, 1947 in New York City. He was the son of pianist Rudolf Serkin, and grandson of the influential violinist Adolf Busch, whose daughter Irene was Peter's mother. Peter was given the middle name Adolf in honor of his grandfather.
In 1958, at age 11, Serkin began studying at the Curtis Institute of Music, where his teachers included the Polish pianist Mieczysław Horszowski, the American virtuoso Lee Luvisi, as well as his own father. He graduated in 1965. He also studied with Ernst Oster, flutist Marcel Moyse, and Karl Ulrich Schnabel.
Career[edit]
His concert career began in 1959, when he first performed at the Marlboro Music Festival, a seminal agent and incubator of chamber music performance in the U.S., established in 1951 by the elder Serkin, Hermann and Adolf Busch, along with Marcel, Blanche and Louis Moyse. Following that performance, Peter Serkin was invited to play with major orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell and the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy.
In 1966, at age 19, Serkin was awarded the Grammy Award for Most Promising New Classical Recording Artist. Three of his recordings garnered Grammy nominations (one of them features six Mozart concertos; the two others feature the music of Olivier Messiaen) and his recordings won other awards. Serkin was the first pianist to receive the Premio Internazionale Musicale Chigiana award in 1983 and he received an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory of Music in 2001.
In 1968, shortly after marrying and becoming a father, Serkin decided to stop playing music altogether. In the winter of 1971, he, his wife, and baby daughter Karina moved to a small rural town in Mexico. About eight months later, on a Sunday morning, Serkin heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach being broadcast over the radio from a neighbor's house. As he listened, he said, "It became clear to me that I should play." He returned to the U.S. and began his musical career anew.
Henceforth, Serkin performed around the world with leading orchestras and such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle, James Levine, and Christoph Eschenbach. He made numerous recordings, on such labels as RCA Victor, featuring music from Bach (including four recordings of the Goldberg Variations - the first made when he was 18, the fourth when he was 47), Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, and Dvořák as well as numerous more recent composers such as Reger, Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Takemitsu, Oliver Knussen, Peter Lieberson, Stefan Wolpe and Charles Wuorinen.
Serkin was a committed performer of new and recent music, having premiered or been the dedicatee of many new works by such composers as Takemitsu, Lieberson, Knussen, Wuorinen and Elliott Carter. The American composer Ned Rorem writes of Serkin, "His uniqueness lies, as I hear it, in a friendly rather than over-awed approach to the classics, which nonetheless plays with the care and brio that is in the family blood, and he's not afraid to be ugly. He approaches contemporary music with the same depth as he does the classics, and he is unique among the superstars in that he approaches it at all."
Among prominent virtuosi, Peter Serkin was one of the first to experiment with period fortepianos, and the first to record late Beethoven sonatas on pianos of both the modern as well as Beethoven's era.
Serkin collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, András Schiff, Alexander Schneider, Pamela Frank, Harold Wright, the Guarneri Quartet, the Budapest Quartet, and other prominent musicians and ensembles, such as principal wind players of major American orchestras. In addition, he was one of the founding members of TASHI and has recorded for a variety of labels. He taught at the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music and was on faculty at the Bard College Conservatory of Music as well as the Yale School of Music, among other institutions. Among those who studied piano with him are Orit Wolf, Simone Dinnerstein, and Cecile Licad.
Personal life and death[edit]
Serkin had five children; he lived in Massachusetts with his wife Regina. He died on February 1, 2020, from pancreatic cancer, at his private residence in Red Hook, New York.
