Seymour Lipkin, American pianist and conductor, Died at 88

Seymour Austen Lipkin was born on May 14, 1927, in Detroit and died November 16, 2015.

He was an American pianist, conductor (Joffrey Ballet) and music teacher (Juilliard School, Curtis Institute of Music).

Seymour had desire to be a conductor, but he happened to labor under the onus of being a piano prodigy.

Seymour moved to Philadelphia at 11 to attend to attend school.
Seymour Austen Lipkin was born on May 14, 1927, in Detroit and died November 16, 2015.

He was an American pianist, conductor (Joffrey Ballet) and music teacher (Juilliard School, Curtis Institute of Music).

Seymour had desired to be a conductor, but he happened to labor under the onus of being a piano prodigy.

Seymour moved to Philadelphia at 11yrs old to attend to attend school.

He attended Curtis Institute, where he boarded with a local family.

In 1947 he received a bachelor’s degree from Curtis, where his teachers included the renowned pianists Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski.

At 20, Seymour became to wide public attention in 1948.

Lipkin went on to play on the world’s foremost recital stages and with the world’s most eminent orchestras.

Seymour Lipkin won first prize in the Rachmaninoff Fund Piano Contest, a nationwide competition held in New York.

Seymour was also a longtime faculty member of the Juilliard School in New York and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

Lipkin appeared as a soloist with the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, and as a recitalist at Town Hall in Manhattan.

Seymour, who also studied conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood, served as an apprentice conductor to George Szell of the Cleveland

Orchestra in the late 1940s. In the late ’50s, he was an assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein.

In 1958, at age 30 Lipkin made his conducting debut, by leading the New York City Opera in Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti.”

Seymour was the music director of the Joffrey Ballet in the 1960s, and of the Long Island Symphony in the ’60s and ’70s, before returning to the piano.

Seymour Lipkin first married to Catherine Bing.

He survived his wife Ellen Werner and children.

Seymour Austen Lipkin passed away at 88 yrs old.