Abbey Simon, Piano

Biography

Abbey Simon has been hailed as a
super-virtuoso whose appearances in the concert halls of the world are
eagerly anticipated not only by music lovers, but by professional
musicians who come to hear him spin his own particular magic. Over the
past 50 years, Mr. Simon has performed with virtually all of the major
orchestras in the music capitals of six continents. He is recognized as
one of the grand masters of the piano.

Through the years, critics have hailed
Mr. Simon's mastery and noted that his playing has its roots of the
great pianists of the past. Improvising at the piano at the age of 3,
he had natural perfect pitch and started taking lessons at the age of
5. After studying with David Saperton, the son-in-law of the celebrated
pianist, Leopold Godowsky, Saperton took him to play for the great
pianist Josef Hofmann. At the age of 8, Hoffmann accepted him as his
scholarship student at the Curtis Institute where he trained with
fellow classmates Jorge Bolet and Sidney Foster.

Upon graduation from the Curtis
Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Mr. Simon went on to win numerous
awards. He made his official debut in New York's Town Hall as the
winner of the prestigious Naumburg Award. Following this success he
performed at Carnegie Hall a number of times before his debut tour of
Europe in 1949. His success in Europe was so great that he did not
return to the United States for some 12 years.

He has been the recipient of the
Federation of Music Clubs Award, the National Orchestral Association
Award, and a Ford Foundation Award. Following his debut in Europe, he
received the Harriet Cohen Medal and the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge
Award.

Mr. Simon's albums for Philips, EMI, HMV
and Vox make him one of the most recorded classical artists of all
time. He has recorded all the concerti of Rachmaninoff, the complete
works of Ravel, and Schumann's Carnaval and Fantasy. The Piano Virtuoso, features
transcriptions by Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Godowsky, and Chasins. His
Chopin collection encompasses some 20 disks. The latest release in this
series is the complete Chopin Nocturnes in a two-record set. Abbey
Simon has now become so closely associated with the music of Frederic
Chopin that the International Chopin Society invited him to be the only
guest artist at their recent gala benefit concert in New York, followed
by a Chopin performance at the Kennedy Center which drew raves.

Despite this enormous outpouring of
recordings, Mr. Simon has stated that he prefers live concert
performance. "Unlike the recording studio where everything is done in
bits and pieces, a recital engenders a high level of energy on both
sides of the footlights. The audience and the artist are in a give and
take situation. For the touring performer the air is always different,
the piano is always different, the acoustics are always different and
therefore, the dynamics of a performance has a quality of its own.
Though the repertoire might be the same, it's a totally new experience
every time and this is what I love."