A student of Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski at the Curtis Institute of Music, Mr. 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. He has performed with Jascha Heifetz (60 concert tour), Oscar Shumsky, Uto Ughi, Arnold Steinhardt, William Primrose, David Soyer and Lawrence Lesser, and toured the U.S., Europe and South America with the Guarneri Quartet. He performed a ten-city European tour with the Juilliard String Quarter in 1999 and appeared again with them at the Library of Congress in 2001.
For many years, Mr. Lipkin concentrated on conducting (he studied with Serge Kouseevitzky and George Szell). After serving as New York Philharmonic”s assistant conductor, he was Music Director of both the Long Island Symphony and the Joffrey Ballet. Returning to extensive concretizing as a pianist, 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. He was formerly director of the University of Maryland”s International Piano Festival and William Kapell Piano Competition.
Lipkin’s recording of the Stravinsky Piano Concerto with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic may be heard on the Sony label. In that orchestra’s recent Special Editions, he appears twice, once as soloist and once as conductor.
His recordings of the complete 32 sonatas of Beethoven have just been released on Newport Classic; all 32 sonatas may also be heard on a single MP3 disc, the first time this has been accomplished. This set has been chosen as one of the ten best of 2004 by the Boston Globe.Mr. Lipkin performed the C Major Piano Concerto, no. 13, K. 415 by W. A. Mozart with A Far Cry on April 20, 2008
To read Jae’s tribute to Mr. Lipkin, click here.
