Over the past two generations, Seymour Lipkin has been hailed by connoisseurs and revered by his colleagues as a pianist of rare cogency, authority and musical wisdom. Studying at the prestigious Curtis Institute, Mr. Lipkin developed hiss immaculate virtuosity as a prize pupil of Rudolf Serkin and Mieczslaw Howszowski. At age 19 he gave his career an auspicious jump-start by winning the Rachmaninoff competition, astounding the judges with his insightful, probing interpretation of Beethoven's knotty, enigmatic Op. 101 Sonata.

Mr. Lipkin went on to appear with all of America's "top five" orchestras - the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago Symphony Orchestras - also performing with many other major ensembles, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Seattle Symphony Orchestras and the Florida Philharmonic. Legendary conductors who engaged and re-engaged him as a concerto collaborator include Serge Koussevitzky, Fritz Reiner, Charles Munch, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, William Steinberg and Christoph con Dohnanyi; more recently, he has worked with noted Maestri Kenneth Schermerhorn, George Cleve, Gerard Schwartz and James Judd. His concerto repertory extends from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven through the major Romantic scores to important twentieth-century works by Stravinsky, Ravel, Lipatti, Casadesus, Menotti and Perle.

Also extremely active in chamber music, Mr. Lipkin has played in Music at Marlboro, the Spoleto Festivals in Italy and the United States, the Midsummer Mozart Festival and the Norfolk Festival. He has performed with Jascha Heifetz; has toured the U.S., Europe and South America with the Guarneri Quartet; has toured Europe with the Juilliard Quartet. He has concertized with Oscar Shumsky, Uto Ughi, Aaron Rosand, Arnold Steinhardt and David Soyer. In the late fall of 1999, he performed a ten city European tour with the Juillard String Quartet. Lipkin again appeared with this prestigious ensemble at concerts at Library of Congress in Spring of 2001.

For many years, Mr. Lipkin concentrated on conducting (he studied the craft with Serge Koussevitzky and George Szell). Beginning as the New York Philharmonic's Assistant Conductor, he subsequently served as Music Director of both the Long Island Symphony and the Joffrey Ballet. He has now returned to extensive concertizing as a pianist, earning particular acclaim for his Beethoven cycles, which have encompassed not only the five concertos and the thirty-two solo piano sonatas and five cello sonatas as well. Last season, Lipkin completed a series of recitals in Boston and New York, featuring the complete piano sonatas of Schubert.

Mr. Lipkin is currently on the faculties of both the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School of Music. Formerly director of the University of Maryland's International Piano Festival and William Kapell Piano Competition, he now serves as the Artistic Director of the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival in Blue Hill, Maine. The warmest critical acclaim greeted his recent solo CD of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" and Op. 109 Sonatas; he has since recorded an album os Schubert's complete violin-piano works with Arnold Steinhardt, which is now being prepared for release. CDs of the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven are being released in Germany pending U.S. distribution. In the recent series of archival releases of the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Lipkin is included twice, as soloist and as conductor. The complete violin and piano works of Schubert with Arnold Steinhardt are in preparation.