Jerome Lowenthal (1932) studied in his native Philadelphia with Olga Samaroff-Stokowski, in New York with William Kapell and Edward Steuermann, and in Paris with Alfred Cortot, meanwhile traveling annually to Los Angeles for coachings with Artur Rubinstein. After winning prizes in three international competitions (Bolzano, Darmstadt, and the Queen Elisabeth Competition), he moved to Jerusalem where, for three years, he played, taught and lectured.

Returning to America, Jerome Lowenthal made his debut with the New York Philharmonic playing Bartok’s Concerto no. 2 in 1963. Since then, he has performed worldwide, from the Aleutians to Zagreb. Conductors with whom he has appeared as soloist include Barenboim, Ozawa, Tilson Thomas, Temirkanov, and Slatkin, as well as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux and Leopold Stokowski. He has played sonatas with Itzhak Perlman, piano duos with Ronit Amir (his late wife), Carmel Lowenthal (his daughter), and Ursula Oppens, as well as quintets with the Lark, Avalon and Shanghai Quartets.

Jerome Lowenthal has recently recorded the Beethoven Fourth Concerto with cadenzas by eleven different composers. His other recordings include concerti by Tschaikovsky and Liszt, solo works by Sinding and Bartok, and chamber-music by Arensky and Taneyev.

Teaching, too, is an important part of Jerome Lowenthal’s musical life. For twenty years at the Juilliard School and for forty-one summers at the Music Academy of the West, he has worked with an extraordinary number of gifted pianists, whom he encourages to understand the music they play in a wide aesthetic and cultural perspective and to project it with the freedom which that perspective allows.