Horacio Gutiérrez

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Horacio Gutiérrez (born in 1948, Havana) is a virtuoso pianist originally from Cuba. He moved with his family to the United States in 1961, at the age of 13, and studied in Los Angeles with Sergey Tarnowsky (1882-1976), Vladimir Horowitz's first teacher in Kiev, and later at the Juilliard School of Music under Adele Marcus (1906-1995), a pupil of the legendary Russian pianist Josef Lhevinne. He later worked privately with American pianist William Masselos (1920-1992), a pupil of Carl Friedberg (1872-1955), who himself had studied with Clara Schumann and Brahms. A U.S. citizen since 1967, he lives and works in the U.S., and is married to pianist Patricia Asher, another Masselos student. He won the Silver Medal in the 1970 Tchaikovsky competition and was soon presented in all major concert venues by Sol Hurok's management, creating a sensation internationally. He has played with all major orchestras and conductors, including Maazel, Andrew Davis, Josef Krips, Rostropovich, David Zinman, Gerard Schwarz, Andrew Litton, Kurt Masur, James Levine, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Christoph Eschenbach, Mehta, Eugene Ormandy, Valery Gergiev, Ozawa, Previn, Leinsdorf, Tennstedt, Ashkenazy, Barenboim and many others. He has recorded for EMI, Telarc and Chandos Records. He is also a teacher at New York's prestigious Manhattan School of Music. One of his few students there, Josu De Solaun Soto, has recently won the First Grand Prize at the XV José Iturbi International Piano Competition, being the only Spanish pianist to ever win the award in the 25 years of its existence. Horacio Gutierrez is known for playing that is imbued with a rare combination of romantic abandon and a classical sense of proportion and is considered by many piano conoisseurs to be one of the greatest pianists of the second half of the 20th century.