Victor Rosenbaum

“The appeal of Rosenbaum’s playing is in his musical temperament, in which fervor and gentleness are happily combined and in the velvet of his tone.....he makes up for all the drudgery the habitual concert-goer has to endure in the hope of finding the real, right thing”.  

That’s how the Boston Globe described American pianist Victor Rosenbaum, an artist whose playing has been called “magisterial” with a “piano touch [that] encompasses bravura, delicacy, and many variations between”.   

Victor Rosenbaum, who studied with Elizabeth Brock and Martin Marks while growing up in Indianapolis, and went on to study with Rosina Lhevinne (Van Cliburn’s teacher) at the Aspen Festival and Leonard Shure, a disciple of the great pianist Artur Schnabel, has become a renowned teacher himself. Passionately devoted to teaching, he has been a member of the college faculty of New England Conservatory since 1967, was Chair of the 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 at 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 pedagogical insights make him a frequent lecturer for teachers groups around the country. Rosenbaum was also Director and President of the Longy School of Music from 1985-2001.  

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, the Puerto Rico International Piano Festival, 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 Harbison, 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. 

A CD of the last piano pieces of Brahms will be released soon on Bridge Records; three other discs on the same label include a Schubert disc (described as a “powerful and poignant record of human experience”) and two Beethoven recordings, one of which (of the last three sonatas) was named by the American Record Guide as one of the top ten classical recordings of 2005.  He has also recorded three discs for the Fleur de Son label — two of Schubert and one of Mozart. 

The Jerusalem Post wrote of Rosenbaum: “His obvious consciousness of everything he was doing....resulted in rich and subtle nuances of dynamics and shadings and in organically shaped, well-rounded phrases; [while] there was refreshing spontaneity and genuine temperament....the reign of intellect never faltered”. 

The New York Times put it succinctly after his performance at Tully Hall: Rosenbaum “could not have been better”.  

B.A., cum laude, Brandeis University; M.F.A., Princeton University. Piano with Leonard Shure, Rosina Lhevinne; theory and composition with Martin Boykan, Edward T. Cone, Earl Kim, Roger Sessions. Former faculty of Eastman School of Music and Brandeis University. Former chair of piano at the Eastern Music Festival. Former Director/President of the Longy School of Music.