Sarasota, Florida Herald-Tribune
June 14, 2003
“Lipkin’s Festival Performance Dazzling. Lipkin played with exquisite elegance and presence. The light and airy allegro con brio glistened with Lipkin’s crystalline technique.”

The Cleveland Plain Dealer
December 10, 2001
“Lipkin provided the performance with its aristocratic anchor. His sense of balance was unerring: he kept the expressive heat on a fine flame until the music asked him to light roaring fires.” (with the Juilliard Quartet)
-Donald Rosenberg

Detroit Free Press
June 22, 2001
“Lipkin’s gorgeous voicing bringing musical lines into high relief… His sound, beautiful in itself, was probably also the most beautiful of anyone I’ve heard on the Kerrytown Steinway.”
-Susan Isaacs Nisbett

The Ann Arbor News
June 25, 2001
“Lipkin played with a pellucid tone and exquisite grace.”
-Mark Stryker

The Washington Post
April 21, 2001
“His intelligence and playfulness with the lighter ideas of Dvorak gave the performance real charm.”
-Philip Kennicott

The New York Times
December 4, 2000
“The essence of Schubert was lovingly realized.”
-Anthony Tommasini

The Boston Globe
October 22, 2000
“His performance of two sonatas and two impromptus was as memorable as his Beethoven. The pianist offered interpretations’ that were full of color, warmth, and a full spectrum of expression. That first movement was remarkable, for the transparency of expression, beauty of tone, and the dynamic spectrum that ranged from a true pianissimo to a genuine fortissimo.”
-Ellen Pfeiffer

The Herald
January 23, 1999
“Seymour Lipkin is a penetrating Beethoven interpreter – a boldly incisive, unaffected pianist with the probing mind to encompass a broad range of styles. So it shouldn’t be entirely surprising he can play superb Bach, too. His way with the First and Fifth piano concertos, with a small group of Florida Philharmonic musicians and conductor James Judd on Thursday night, evoked such exalted Bach pianists as Glean Gould and Rosalynn Turock, yet was distinctively Lipkin’s. He caught the Italianate character of the Fifth Concerto, which has a little arioso core of a slow movement, which he spaced widely, yet with a simplicity that made it touching without becoming sentimental. But it was in the fast movements of both concertos, especially the D minor, that Lipkin’s playing was exhilarating for his unrelenting, crisp articulation, clarity, fluency and dynamic shading in contrapuntal passage work.”
-James Roos

The Boston Globe
March 17, 1998
“Lipkin’s performance of Opus 111 rose to an exalted level – both excitable and serene; it was wise and experienced playing, but it also was direct and spontaneous. He didn’t reach for profundity, but took it for granted, a breathtaking response, and in the end he demonstrated the rarest gift of all, the gift to be simple.”
-Richard Dyer

The Boston Globe
October 21, 1997
“Here was wise, subtle, assured playing blessed with a sense of timing – not just punctuality and smoothness of attack but an unerring sense of what kind of attack and in relation to what else. This was so acute and varied and organic that it seemed almost a part of nature and therefore very easy to take for granted.”
-Richard Buell

The Sun-Sentinel
July 5, 1997
“This was precisely the sort of no-holds-barred pianism that explains the lasting impact of Beethoven. Lipkin’s intense identification with the music was never in doubt. He made the often startling ideas about harmony and thematic development in these works sound as bold as ever.”
-Tim Smith

The Miami Herald
July 14, 1997
“In the three works of Op. 2 he was boldly incisive. The No. 3 in C Major was larger than life-size, the mood clairvoyantly captured, the light on each phrase perfectly turned.”
-James Roos

The Miami Herald
July 4, 1997
“Lipkin is a musician’s musician with acute insight into phrasing, but also a free-wheeling technician who plays ”unafraid” Beethoven with uncompromising fluency. His clarity and steel-trap logic were riveting in the first two sonatas. But Op.2, No.3 took on epic proportions.”

The Boston Sunday Herald
November 17, 1996
“Emotion erupts at Lipkin’s hand as he brings Beethoven Sonatas alive!”
-Ellen Pfeifer

The American Record Guide
“Brendel and Lipkin have long been identified with the composer, and for good reason: both deliver stylish interpretations with musical conviction. Lipkin is easily the bolder, more heaven-storming of the two and makes a stronger first impression.
-Hawkins

The Boston Globe
October 21, 1996
“Every minute of his playing is alive, breathing and moving toward its destiny.”
-Richard Dyer

The Boston Herald
October 21, 1996
“Pianist brings thunder to sonatas! In the adagio, he established a mood of hushed mystery, the sound a kind of delicate silken thread that increased not only in dynamic but in density and saturation. The finale was full of verve and sparkle.
In the Sonata Op. 27, No.1, Lipkin provided a mercurial sense of shifting mood and colors. The middle section of the opening movement was a thunderous outburst and the following allegro featured an exciting galloping section of tremendous energy. This was tremendously exciting playing, full of risks and swashbuckling abandon.”
-Ellen Pfeifer

The Boston Globe
November 29, 1994
“Sunday afternoon the Gardner Museum’s Tapestry Room was the scene of a piano recital as musically distinguished as they come. Seymour Lipkin may well have been concertizing since as far back as 1948, but there was nothing gray, elder-statesmanish or the least bit tired about the Schubert A major Sonata (D 664) or Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” as we received them from him.

The Schubert established its own cogently individual tone of voice right from the start. The piece itself – a songful, compact and relatively unshadowed one – offers temptations to languish and preen and editorialize that this pianist wasn’t having any of. The singing phrase came instead by way of touch and balance and harmonic weighting, more rubato would have been beside the point. And how specific that sense of touch could be – almost, it occurred as if the notes were vowels and the pianist’s attack pedaling and timing the equivalent of an entire garment of shaping consonants. A strained figure of speech, perhaps, but something of the sort is what assuredly gave the Allegro finale a youthful sparkle it seldom has.

Fiery, biting dance rhythms marked the beginning of the “Hammerklavier.” The tempos never seemed anguished over, they were true to the character of the music. If it announces to one kind of impressive Beethoven playing to adopt an unusually slow tempo and “hold” both it and the listener (a Schnabel specialty), it is another to maintain a forward, undeviating pulse yet communicate a sense of inward stillness. The latter was what Lipkin achieved in OP 106’s famous slow movement. Overall, it wasn’t the overtly demonstrative, gestural kind of Beethoven playing that makes it to the gallery full force. The virtues were patrician ones. “
-Richard Buell

The Philadelphia Inquirer
October 29, 1994
“Pianist Seymour Lipkin pursued the swashbuckling elements of the piece Wednesday night with a virtuosic brio.
-Lesley Valdez

PRESS QUOTES FROM 1999 EUROPEAN TOUR

November 16, 1999
“…and the noble Seymour Lipkin…
…Lipkin’s fabulously clear piano playing fitted in, in an ideal partnership.”
-Stuttgarter Zeitung

November 10, 1999
“Especially in Mozart’s second piano quartet were we delighted by the unpretentious intensity. Not least thanks to Lipkin’s finely delineated bravura at the keyboard, there arosxe an interpretation of refreshing tenderness.”
-Westdeutsche Zeitung, Dusseldorf

“..in Mozart’s second piano quartet, Lipkin showed himself to have fortunate touch at the keyboard. The tones glided out as if on a string of pearls. Every trill appeared so naturally, and then disappeared, that it was a joy to listen to him. Three members of legendary ensemble (Julliard String Quartet) appeared with e American star – pianist Seymour Lipkin and, in quartets by Mozart, Copland and Brahms, gave honor to their reputation.”
-Neue Rhein Zeitung, Dusseldorf

November 8, 1999
“Pianist Seymour Lipkin showed himself already here (Copland Quartet) as one with a commanding grasp of the aesthetics of sound, who elicited from the Steinway of the hall clear, fully-ringing tones. But only in the first piano quartet of Brahms could he really display his painistic capacities. With the calm self – possession and the maturity of his ace, Lipkin overcame the difficulties of the score with technical brilliance and played with an unbelievable intensity. He found a splendid balance between accompaniment and soloistic passages; but convincing above all was his ability to utilize so completely the sound spectrum of the piano. After the furious Rondo alla zingarese, the enthusiasm in the hall was boundless.”
-Bonner Rundschau, Bonn

November 9, 1999
“Lipkin understood not to make full use of the preponderance of his sound, but to adapt it to the weaker strings… And then came Brahms, the stormy young Brahms. In the Piano quartet in G minor, Seymour Lipkin showed himself for the first time in his full scope and superiority. In an even stronger way than in the Copland, he knew in Brahms how to retrain the enormous masses of sound, so w\that while producing varied colors in the mighty chords, he never pressed the string instruments more than absolutely necessary. However superabundance and spontaneously appearing vitality never became uncontrolled and for this reason, the listeners felt so close to the speech of the yound Brahms.”
-Sudwest Presse Schwabischer Tagblatt, Tubingen