American pianist Victor Rosenbaum has concertized widely as soloist and chamber music performer in the United States, Europe, Asia, Israel, Brazil, and Russia in such prestigious halls as Tully Hall in New York and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has collaborated with such artists as Leonard Rose, Paul Katz, Arnold Steinhardt, Robert Mann, Joseph Silverstein, James Buswell, Malcolm Lowe, and the Brentano, Borromeo, and Cleveland String Quartets. Festival appearances have included Tanglewood, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Kfar Blum and Tel Hai (in Israel), Yellow Barn, Kneisel Hall (Blue Hill), Musicorda, Masters de Pontlevoy (France), the Heifetz Institute, the International Keyboard Institute and Festival in New York, the International Music Seminar in Vienna, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, the Festival at Walnut Hill School, and The Art of the Piano Festival in Cincinnati. Concert appearances have brought him to Chicago, Minneapolis, Tokyo, Beijing, St. Petersburg (Russia), Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and New York, among others. In addition to his absorption in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in particular Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms), Rosenbaum has performed and given premieres of works by many contemporary composers, including John Heiss, Peter Westergaard, Norman Dinerstein, Arlene Zallman, Donald Harris, Daniel Pinkham, Miriam Gideon, Stephen Albert, and many others. A musician of diverse talents, Rosenbaum is also a composer and has frequently conducted in the Boston area and beyond.
Rosenbaum, who studied with Elizabeth Brock and Martin Marks in his home town of Indianapolis, and went on to study with Rosina Lhevinne at the Aspen Festival and Leonard Shure (while earning degrees at Brandeis University and Princeton) has become a renowned teacher himself. A member of the faculty of New England Conservatory in Boston from 1967 to 2020, he chaired its piano department for more than a decade, and was also Chair of Chamber Music. Also on the faculty of Mannes School of Music in New York from 2004-2017, he has been Visiting Professor of Piano at the Eastman School of Music, a guest teacher at Juilliard, and presents lectures, workshops, and master classes for teachers’ groups and schools both in the U. S. and abroad, including London’s Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, and Guildhall School, the conservatories of St. Petersburg and Moscow, Beijing Central Conservatory, Shanghai Conservatory, the Toho School in Tokyo, Tokyo Ondai, most major schools in Taiwan, and other institutions such as the Menuhin School near London, and the Jerusalem Music Center.
His highly praised recording of Schubert is on Bridge Records and the release of the last three Beethoven sonatas on the same label was named by American Record Guide as one of the top ten classical recordings of 2005. In 2019, Bridge released a new Beethoven disc with sonatas, variations, and Bagatelles. Three discs on the Fleur de Son label feature music of Schubert and Mozart; and a new CD on the Bridge label of the late piano pieces of Brahms will be released shortly.
Of his Tully Hall performance, the New York Times said, simply: “He could not have been better.” And the Boston Globe described him as “one of those artists who make up for all the drudgery the habitual concert goer has to endure in the hopes of finding the occasional, real right thing.”