An intellectual pianist in the best sense, Jonathan Biss has a probing and poetic musical mind wedded to a playful, spontaneous temperament. Biss, 34, is also a musician who craves performing in public.
Alice Herz-Sommer, the 110-year-old Holocaust survivor and concert pianist whose life was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, has died.
During her lifespan of 110 years, Alice Herz-Sommer has been an accomplished concert pianist, teacher, prisoner in Theresienstadt, wife and mother, and now she is the star of an Oscar-nominated documentary.
When Yefim Bronfman performs Brahms\’ Second Piano Concerto with conductor Lionel Bringuier and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl on July 31, he will be tackling what is known as a real \”finger buster,\” a term used for a work that is awkwardly conceived for a pianist\’s hands or physically demanding. The Brahms concerto is both.
One of the great joys of L.A. jazz, from the mid-1970s to the mid-\’80s, was the blossoming of jazz pianist Dave Frishberg into a singer-songwriter of quirky, yet warmly satisfying, material.
\”I became a [musician] because she gave me two choices: to either become the first Jewish president of the United States or a great concert pianist,\” Fleischer added.
There was a time when Jews dominated the ranks of American orchestras, and superstars like Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern were musical ambassadors to the world. The fact that today\’s master Jewish musicians tend to have proteges with names like Yo Yo Ma, Kyung-Wha Chung and Lang Lang is one hint that for many Jews, classical music is no longer a top priority.
Summing up her experience, Schramm observes, \”If we look at the headlines, we see generalities. But when we look at one individual, we see more deeply.
One hot summer night in 1997, under the starry desert sky at Masada mountaintop in Israel, I fell in love with Rami Kleinstein.
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