Gary Graffman

Gary Graffman studied at Curtis Institute of Music. Laura Mikkola and Robert McDonald are recorded as having studied under Gary Graffman. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are classical music and art music. Employment is recorded with Curtis Institute of Music.

Graffman was born in New York City on October 14, 1928, to Russian-Jewish parents. Having started piano at age 3, Graffman entered the Curtis Institute of Music at age 7 in 1936 as a piano student of Isabelle Vengerova. After graduating from Curtis in 1946, he made his professional solo debut with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. From 1946 to 1948, he studied at Columbia University. In 1949, Graffman won the Leventritt Competition. He then furthered his piano studies with Rudolf Serkin at the Marlboro Music Festival and informally with Vladimir Horowitz. In 1954, he returned to Columbia to perform Edward MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2 conducted by Leopold Stokowski at the university's bicentennial concert.

Upon graduation, Graffman played with numerous orchestras and performed concerts and recitals internationally. Over the next three decades, he toured and recorded extensively, performing solo and with orchestras around the globe. He revived the Tchaikovsky 2nd and 3rd Piano Concertos, recorded by CBS with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and several of his students play these works. In 1964, he recorded Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. He also made a classic recording of Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1966; it was reissued on CD as part of Sony Classical's "Great Performances" series in 2006. In the 1970s, Graffman appeared with the Guarneri Quartet and the Juilliard String Quartet in performances of chamber music. Probably Graffman's best-known recorded performance was for the soundtrack of the 1979 Woody Allen movie Manhattan in which he played Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic.

In 1981, Graffman published a memoir, I Really Should Be Practicing. In 1985, he gave the UK premiere of Korngold's Piano Concerto for the left hand, a work that Paul Wittgenstein had commissioned in the 1920s. Seven left-hand works have been commissioned for Graffman. In 1993, for example, he performed the world premiere of Ned Rorem's Piano Concerto No. 4, written specifically for the left hand, and in 2001 he premiered Daron Hagen's concerto Seven Last Words. The American composer William Bolcom composed Gaea, a concerto for two pianos left-hand for Graffman and Leon Fleisher. It received its first performance in Baltimore in April 1996.

Graffman was married to Naomi Helfman, who died in 2019. Graffman died in his New York City home on December 27, 2025, at the age of 97. An obituary was published in The New York Times.

* • Graffman, Gary (1982). I Really Should Be Practicing. New York: Avon..