BIEGEL, JEFFREY  BIOGRAPHY

Jeffrey Biegel is one of today’s most acclaimed artists having created a multi-faceted career as a pianist, composer and arranger. His electrifying technique and mesmerising touch have received critical acclaim and garnered praise worldwide. His career has been marked by bold, creative achievements and highlighted by a series of firsts: he performed the first live internet recitals in New York and Amsterdam in 1997 and 1998, and, in 1999, assembled the largest consortium of orchestras (over 25), to celebrate the millennium with a new concerto composed for him by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. The Millennium Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra had its première with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 2000. He performed the Boston première of the restored, original 1924 manuscript of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Boston Pops. He has transcribed Balakirev’s Islamey Fantasy for piano and orchestra, and given its première with the American Symphony Orchestra in 2001. Charles Strouse composed a new work titled Concerto America for him, given its première with the Boston Pops in 2002. He further arranged the piano part for Billy Joel’s Symphonic Fantasies in 2006, with performances at the Eastern Music Festival, the Boris Brott Festival and with the Indianapolis, Harrisburg, and other American orchestras. His new editions for Schirmer’s Performance Editions include Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood and a new Sonatina Album with accompanying audio CDs. Jeffrey Biegel joined eighteen co-commissioning orchestras for Lowell Liebermann’s Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra, composed exclusively for him for the 2006-07 and 2007-08 seasons. The World Première took place with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andreas Delfs, and the European Première featured the Schleswig-Holstein Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gerard Oskamp.

Until the age of three, Jeffrey Biegel was unable to hear or speak, until his hearing was corrected by surgery. The ‘reverse Beethoven’ phenomenon can explain his life in music, as he heard only vibrations in his formative years. Born a second-generation American, his roots are of Russian and Austrian heritage. A Russian cousin, pianist Herman Kosoff, emigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century, having studied with the great Leopold Godowsky in Austria. Jeffrey Biegel won the First Grand Prize in the 1989 Marguerite Long International Piano Competition and First Prize in the 1985 William Kapell/University of Maryland International Piano Competition. He studied at The Juilliard School with Adele Marcus, herself a pupil of Josef Lhevinne and Artur Schnabel. He is currently on the piano faculty at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY), and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

For further information, please visit http://www.jeffreybiegel.com.