Abbey Henry Simon was an American concert pianist, teacher, and recording artist.
16 Facts About Abbey Simon
1.
2.
Abbey Simon was a protege of Josef Hofmann at the Curtis Institute of Music and a winner of the Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1940.
3.
Abbey Simon was called a "supervirtuoso" by The New York Times.
4.
At the age of eight, Abbey Simon was accepted by Josef Hofmann as a scholarship student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his classmates included Jorge Bolet and Sidney Foster.
5.
Abbey Simon took lessons from Leopold Godowsky, Dora Zaslavsky, and Harold Bauer.
6.
Abbey Simon won the Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1940.
7.
Abbey Simon's virtuosity is marked not only by speed, power, lightness and accuracy but by intricate interplay of voices and lambent colors.
8.
Abbey Simon toured in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific.
9.
Abbey Simon appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony, and the Trenton Symphony Orchestra, among many others.
10.
Abbey Simon gave master classes at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and the Geneva Conservatory.
11.
Abbey Simon served on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, Hunter College, the Moores School of Music in Houston, and the Juilliard School of Music in New York City.
12.
Abbey Simon's students include pianists Josef Verba, Eliza Garth, Frederic Chiu, Karen Shaw, John Kamitsuka, Erika Nickrenz, Richard Dowling, Elyane Laussade, Adrienne Park, Roger Wright, Garnet Ungar, Hsia-Jung Chang, Shelly Berg, Andrew Cooperstock, Daniel Glover, David Korevaar, Nancy Weems, David Westfall, Terence Yung and Martha Argerich.
13.
Abbey Simon maintained a home in Houston, Texas, where he was, from 1977 until his retirement in April 2019, Cullen Distinguished Professor of Music in the Moores School of Music in the University of Houston.
14.
Abbey Simon died in Geneva on December 18,2019, a few weeks prior to his 100th birth anniversary.
15.
Abbey Simon recorded extensively on the VOX, Philips, and His Master's Voice labels.
16.
Abbey Simon's discography includes the complete works of Frederic Chopin and Maurice Ravel, major works of Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann, and all of the piano concerti of Sergei Rachmaninoff with Leonard Slatkin and the St Louis Symphony Orchestra.