A little bit of catch up:
Mary Higgins Clark, noted suspense author.
Peter Serkin. I swear I’ve heard this name somewhere before, but I can’t place where. He was a pianist, came from a prominent musical family, and was a child prodigy.
Yet, though he was proud of his heritage, Mr. Serkin found it a burden. Like many who came of age in the 1960s, he questioned the establishment, both in society at large and within classical music. He resisted a traditional career trajectory and at 21 stopped performing, going for months without even playing the piano.
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Throughout his career, he presented recital programs that juxtaposed the old and the new: 12-tone scores and Mozart sonatas; thorny pieces by the mid-20th-century German composer Stefan Wolpe and polyphonic works from the Renaissance. Admirers of his playing appreciated how he drew out allusions to music’s past in contemporary scores, while conveying the radical elements of old music.
He played almost all the piano works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Wolpe. He also introduced dozens of pieces, including major works and concertos, written for him by composers like Toru Takemitsu, Charles Wuorinen and, especially, his childhood friend Peter Lieberson.
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Though Mr. Serkin never completely shook off the early perception of him as “the counterculture’s reluctant envoy to the straight concert world,” as the Times critic Donal Henahan called him in an admiring 1973 profile, over time he reconciled to the ways, even the dress protocols, of that classical world and developed productive associations with artists like the Guarneri String Quartet, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (who had married Peter Lieberson) and the conductors Seiji Ozawa, Herbert Blomstedt, Robert Shaw and Pierre Boulez.
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Mr. Serkin relished teaching, and held posts at institutions including the Mannes School of Music and the Juilliard School in New York, and, in recent years, Bard. He so enjoyed spending summers teaching at the Tanglewood Music Institute that he bought a home in the Berkshires and lived there for years.
Just in this morning: Bernard J. Ebbers, convicted WorldCom CEO.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 3rd, 2020 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Books, Law, Music, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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