Peter Serkin

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Peter Serkin (born July 24, 1947) is a distinguished American pianist.

He was born in New York City and is the son of one of the world's leading pianists, Rudolf Serkin, and grandson of the legendary violinist Adolf Busch, whose daughter Irene had married Rudolf Serkin. (Peter was given the middle name Adolf in honor of his grandfather, according to Rudolf Serkin: A life by Stephen Lehmann and Marion Farber, Oxford, 2003, p. 96).

Serkin began studying at Curtis Institute of Music when he was just 11 years old, in 1958. He graduated in 1965; his teachers included the great Polish pianist Mieczysław Horszowski, Lee Luvisi, and his father. He has also studied with Ernst Oster, flutist Marcel Moyse, and Karl Ulrich Schnabel. His concert career began in 1959, when he first performed at the Marlboro Music Festival; following that performance, he was also invited to play with major orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell and the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy.

In 1966, at the age of 19, Serkin was awarded the Grammy Award for Best New Classical Artist|Most Promising New Classical Recording Artist. Three of his recordings since then have won Grammy nominations (one of them featuring six Mozart concertos; the two others feature the music of Messaien) and his recordings have won other awards. Serkin was the first pianist to receive the Premio Internazionale Musicale Chigiana award, and received an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory of Music in 2001.

Peter Serkin had no contact with his father Rudolf from "the late 1960s through much of the 1970s"; they fully reconciled, but the separation had been "a painful time for the family" (Lehmann and Farber, p. 102). In 1968, shortly after marrying and becoming a father, Peter Serkin decided to stop playing music altogether. In the winter of 1971, he and his wife and young child moved to a small rural town in Mexico. About eight months later, on a Sunday morning, Serkin heard Bach being broadcast over the radio from a neighbor's house. As he listened, he says, "It became clear to me that I should play." He returned to the U. S. and began his musical career anew. (The story is recounted in Conroy, Dogs Bark. - see below)

Since then, Serkin has 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 has made numerous recordings, 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 Dvorak as well as numerous more recent composers such as Messaien, Takemitsu, Oliver Knussen, Webern, Lieberson, and Schoenberg.

Serkin is an unwavering advocate of contemporary music; many new works have been written for him to debut by such composers as Toru Takemitsu, Peter Lieberson, Oliver Knussen, Elliot Carter and Charles Wuorinen. 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." (Quoted by Conroy; see below.)

Peter Serkin was one of the first major pianists to experiment with period fortepianos, and the first to record late Beethoven sonatas on both a period piano and a modern one.

Serkin has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Alexander Schneider, Pamela Frank, the Guarneri, Andras Schiff, Budapest and Orion string quartets and other prominent musicians and ensembles. In addition, he is one of the founding members of TASHI and has recorded for a variety of labels. He has five children and two grandchildren and lives in Massachusetts with his wife Regina. He has taught at Juilliard and Curtis and teaches at Bard College as well as other institutions.