Pinchas Zukerman has remained a phenomenon in the world of music for over four decades. His musical genius, prodigious technique and unwavering artistic standards are a marvel. With an utterly inimitable tonal quality and a prolific history of glorious music making, the name Pinchas Zukerman is equally respected as violinist, violist, conductor, pedagogue and chamber musician.
Pianist Yefim Bronfman has a long and celebrated history with the VRS having performed in our very first season and numerous times since. Today, Bronfman returns as a seasoned keyboard virtuoso whose commanding technique and exceptional lyrical gifts have distinguished him as “one of the greatest pianists alive today” (The New York Times).
It is indeed a rare opportunity to hear these two master musicians together.
“The balance between instruments was meticulously shaded from the first moments… Bronfman’s piano was an attentive but never pushy partner, providing a genial, dappled undercurrent for Zukerman’s insouciant flights.” – Chicago Classical Review
Program
Schubert
Sonatina in A minor, D. 385
Beethoven
Sonata no. 7 in C minor, Op. 30, no. 2
Brahms
Viola sonata in F minor, Op. 120, no. 1
Links
Learn more about Pinchas Zukerman.
Learn more about Yefim Bronfman.
Biography
Pinchas Zukerman
Pinchas Zukerman’s 2012-2013 season includes over 100 worldwide performances, bringing him to multiple destinations in North America, Europe and Asia. Mr. Zukerman is currently in his 14th season as Music Director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa. In his fourth season as Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, he leads the ensemble in concerts in Switzerland, Russia and the United Kingdom. Additional orchestral engagements include the Boston, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Colorado and Kansas City Symphonies. Guest appearances with international orchestras include the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Maarinsky State Theatre Orchestra, Orchestre de Monte Carlo, Czech Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, Miyazaki Festival Orchestra and the Teatro San Carlo Orchestra in Naples. Recitals with pianist Angela Cheng take the duo to Salzburg, Prague, Philadelphia, Palm Beach, Milan, Taiwan, Madrid, Helsinki and Verbier, among others. His chamber ensemble, the Zukerman ChamberPlayers, appears at the Ravinia and Toronto summer music festivals and later tours to Los Angeles, Phoenix, China, Japan, and throughout Europe and South America.
Over the last decade, Pinchas Zukerman has become as equally regarded a conductor as he is an instrumentalist, leading many of the world’s top ensembles in a wide variety of the orchestral repertoire’s most demanding works. A devoted and innovative pedagogue, Mr. Zukerman chairs the Pinchas Zukerman Performance Program at the Manhattan School of Music, where he has pioneered the use of distance-learning technology in the arts. In Canada, he has established the NAC Institute for Orchestra Studies and the Summer Music Institute encompassing the Young Artists, Conductors and Composers Programs.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1948, Pinchas Zukerman came to America in 1962 where he studied at The Juilliard School with Ivan Galamian. He has been awarded the Medal of Arts, the Isaac Stern Award for Artistic Excellence and was appointed as the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative’s first instrumentalist mentor in the music discipline. Pinchas Zukerman’s extensive discography contains over 100 titles, and has earned him 21 Grammy nominations and two awards.
Yefim Bronfman
Grammy Award-winning pianist Yefim (“Fima”) Bronfman is among the most talented virtuosos performing today. His commanding technique and exceptional lyrical gifts have won consistent critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences worldwide for his solo recitals, prestigious orchestral engagements and expanding catalogue of recordings.
Mr. Bronfman’s 2012/13 season begins early with concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle in Berlin, Salzburg and the London Proms followed by the Tonhalle Orchestra, Zurich with David Zinman and London’s Philharmonia conducted by Tugan Sokhiev. A year-long residency with the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra and long time collaborator Mariss Jansons begins in the fall and encompasses orchestral and chamber music in a broad range of repertoire. A return to Salzburg’s Easter Festival with the Dresden Staatskapelle and Christian Thielemann is planned for the spring followed by appearances with the Vienna Philharmonic and Michael Tilson Thomas in Vienna and London, subscription concerts in Spain and Germany and a spring tour with Ensemble Wien-Berlin.
In North America he works with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in one of their infrequent Carnegie Hall visits conducted by Fabio Luisi and returns to the orchestras in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Montreal where he is a beloved regular. In collaboration with mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená he will make a short winter tour including New York’s Carnegie Hall and in solo recital he can be heard in Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta as well as the great halls of Paris, Berlin, and Lisbon. The 2011/12 US season began with the Chicago Symphony’s opening Gala conducted by Ricardo Muti followed by a residency with the Cleveland Orchestra in Miami and Cleveland focusing on the concerti and chamber music of Brahms. A recital tour in winter culminated with Carnegie Hall followed by the world premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s concerto commissioned for him by the New York Philharmonic with whom he toured the west coast in the spring. In Europe he completed a two-season project of the three Bartók concerti with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen in London, Spain, Brussels and gave recitals in Amsterdam, Vienna, Frankfurt, Milan and Lucerne. In partnership with Emmanuel Pahud he visited Spain, Turkey, Denmark and London where he returned in the spring with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas followed by a tour with the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Mr. Bronfman works regularly with an illustrious group of conductors, including Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Christoph von Dohnányi, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Zubin Mehta, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Yuri Temirkanov, Franz Welser-Möst, and David Zinman. Summer engagements have regularly taken him to the major festivals of Europe and the US.
He has also given numerous solo recitals in the leading halls of North America, Europe and the Far East, including acclaimed debuts at Carnegie Hall in 1989 and Avery Fisher Hall in 1993. In 1991 he gave a series of joint recitals with Isaac Stern in Russia, marking Mr. Bronfman’s first public performances there since his emigration to Israel at age 15. That same year he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, one of the highest honors given to American instrumentalists. In 2010 he was honored as the recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane prize in piano performance from Northwestern University.
Widely praised for his solo, chamber and orchestral recordings, he was nominated for a GRAMMY® Award in 2009 for his Deutsche Grammophon recording of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s piano concerto with Salonen conducting and with whom he won a GRAMMY® Award in 1997 for his recording of the three Bartók Piano Concerti and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Most recently his performance of Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto with Andris Nelsons and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from the 2011 Lucerne Festival is now available on DVD, with his performance of Rachmaninoff’s third concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle already available on the EuroArts label. His most recent CD releases are Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 with Mariss Jansons and the Bayerischer Rundfunk, a recital disc, ‘Perspectives’, complementing Mr. Bronfman’s designation as a Carnegie Hall ‘Perspectives’ artist for the 2007-08 season, and recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti as well as the Triple Concerto together with violinist Gil Shaham, cellist Truls Mørk, and the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label.
Born in Tashkent in the Soviet Union on 10 April 1958, Yefim Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, where he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, head of the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States, he studied at The Juilliard School, Marlboro and the Curtis Institute, and with Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher and Rudolf Serkin.
Yefim Bronfman became an American citizen in July 1989.
This performance is sponsored by the Martha Lou Henley Charitable Foundation.
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