Biography

I have two careers: music and photography.

In music, I studied piano at The Juilliard School, starting at age eight in the Preparatory Division, and later earning degrees, studying with Sasha Gorodnitzki and Rosina Lhévinne. I won the Kosciuszko Foundation's Chopin Prize and the Morris Loeb Prize from Juilliard. I played some solo recitals, and a concerto with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and then accompanied recitals of Kyung-Wha Chung, Yo-Yo Ma (including his New York debut in Carnegie Recital Hall), Jon Vickers, and Renata Tebaldi, among others. With Vickers, I toured in Canada and the United States, and there is a commercial recording (VAI) of us performing Schubert's Die Winterreise. I returned to the piano in 2008 after many years, and have begun performing in public again. You can click to see a video of me playing Málaga, from Iberia by Albéniz.

In photography, I started in the 1970's as a hobbyist, and to buy the equipment I desired I started taking jobs, mostly photographing art objects. I taught myself technical skills from many books, and composition from books and from studying famous photographs and art. Eventually I gravitated to portraiture, which I love because it adds elements of psychology and intuition, and lets me get to know many more people than I would otherwise. Groups (trios, quartets, etc.) are especially fun because people are reacting to each other in a session, as well as to me.

I've had photos published in Time, Life, Newsweek and People magazines, and many photos in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section over the years. Artists I've photographed for posters, LP and CD covers include Peter Schickele, Rob Kapilow, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Elly Ameling, Isaac Stern, Rudolf Serkin, Peter Serkin, Carol Wincenc, and Seiji Ozawa. For many years I have done portrait and event photography for The Juilliard School and other arts organizations.

In 1979 I started taking close-up photos of musical instruments, and this resulted in a children's book, The Violin Close Up, and other collections of images, many of which are on this website, and some of which are on gift items for sale at the Juilliard Store in New York's Lincoln Center.

Also, I have had lots of experience making photo-composites (both digital and pre-digital). For more than twenty years I transposed heads, bodies and backgrounds to make humorous photographs for a law firm that lampooned its partners every year. This skill has come in handy for substituting new members into musical groups, and once I added my own legs and feet to a waist-up photo of conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, so that a life-size standing cutout poster could be made (to raise money, not to conduct the orchestra). Of course, many of my humorous P.D.Q. Bach (Peter Schickele) photos are composites.