Nadia Reisenberg Collection

Nadia Reisenberg was an influential soloist, chamber musician and teacher, born in 1904 in Lithuania. Her studies with Leonid Nikolayev (St. Petersburg Conservatory), Alexander Lambert (a Liszt pupil) and Josef Hofmann provided her with the musical judgment and technical skills with which to build a career. The excitement of her early concert appearances in New York in the 1920s attracted much attention, and she became an important concert artist. As a concerto soloist, she appeared with Barbirolli, Rodzinski, Bodanzky, Koussevitsky, and others. Her performances of all twenty-seven of the Mozart concertos, played in consecutive weekly broadcasts with Alfred Wallenstein and the WOR Mutual Radio Symphony Orchestra in the 1939-40 season, are now legendary. (The Mozart broadcasts have been digitized and transferred to CD-Rs; copies of these recordings are available. Contact the Curator for details.)

After about 1947, Reisenberg chose to concentrate on small ensemble work and teaching. She performed with the Budapest and Juilliard String Quartets and with a variety of instrumentalists, including Joseph Schuster, William Kroll, Erick Friedman, Simeon Bellison, Alexander Schneider, Benny Goodman, and with her sister, noted thereminist Clara Rockmore. She was associated with the Mannes College of Music and the Juilliard School but also taught at the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Southern California, the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem and at other schools.

Reisenberg's repertory was extremely varied, but she was noted especially for her presentations of nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian piano works. She gave the New York premiere of the Rimsky-Korsakov Piano Concerto and played the first American performance of Vincent d'Indy's Symphony on a French Mountain Air, both with the New York Philharmonic. Aside from her teaching, Reisenberg's principal legacy is her recordings. In addition to her commercial issues, there are approximately two hundred acetate transcription discs which include her performances of the Mozart concertos with Wallenstein, her repertory of solo and chamber music, and radio interviews.

The International Piano Archives at Maryland has published a book about Nadia Reisenberg and issued a double-compact disc record album as follows: Robert Sherman and Alexander Sherman. "Nadia Reisenberg: A Musician's Scrapbook." College Park: International Piano Archives at Maryland, 1986. 192 p. NADIA REISENBERG: An Album of Chamber Music. College Park: IPAM Records, 1989. (IPAM 1201 A-B). Includes performances with Alexander Lambert, Simeon Bellison, Joseph Schuster, Benny Goodman, Leonard Rose, Erick Friedman, Clara Rockmore, and members of the Juilliard Quartet.