Russell Sherman

The prominent pianist Russell Sherman was identified with the music of Beethoven, Liszt, and contemporary composers. He was also an important educator, an author, and a photographer. Sherman was born on March 24, 1930, in New York. His father was a prosperous raincoat maker, and the family lived at a hotel that was also home to such classical music stars as opera singers Lily Pons and Lauritz Melchior, as well as pianist Clifford Curzon. Sherman started piano lessons at six and began studying with Edward Steuermann when he was 11. At 15, he made his debut at New York's Town Hall with the New York Philharmonic under conductor Leonard Bernstein. Sherman attended Columbia University, studying humanities and graduating in 1949. In 1959, he stopped performing publicly for more than a decade but continued to teach piano, first at Pomona College in California (1959-1962), then at the University of Arizona (1962-1967), and finally, in the late '60s, at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he remained for more than 50 years. The list of his students there includes such prominent names as Marc-André Hamelin, Randall Hodgkinson, and Wha Kyung Byun, who became his second wife. Sherman also served as a guest faculty member at Harvard University and the Juilliard School in New York. Returning to performing in the '70s, Sherman recorded Liszt's Transcendental Etudes in 1974. His digital recording debut came on the Pro Arte label in 1984, performing sonatas by Beethoven. He remained closely identified with that composer and was claimed to be the first American pianist to record the complete cycle of Beethoven's sonatas. Those recordings appeared on the GM Recordings label owned by Sherman's New England Conservatory colleague Gunther Schuller. He often championed the music of Liszt, and he frequently played contemporary music by the likes of Schuller, George Perle, and Ralph Shapey, as well as Debussy and Schoenberg. Sherman appeared in recital around the U.S., Europe, and South America, and he performed as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, among other major groups. He published a book of essays, Piano Pieces, on piano performance, and he was an avid photographer, follower of scientific literature, and baseball fan. Sherman remained active into old age, releasing an album of Chopin Mazurkas in 2012. He died in Lexington, Massachusetts, on September 30, 2023.
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