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Phillip Bush

Pianist and festival director Phillip Bush is a versatile artist equally at home in chamber music, traditional repertory, and contemporary music of many kinds. He is also a notable educator. Bush was born on January 4, 1961, in Ridgewood, New Jersey. His mother was German, and his father taught French at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Bush grew up mostly in that city. He studied with Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and has named Fleisher as a chief influence. Influences of another sort came from the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts in Canada, which Bush attended from 1981 to 1983. There, he met Steve Reich and several other contemporary composers and musicians. Bush would go on to perform with both the Steve Reich and Musicians ensemble (from 1996 to 2008) and periodically with the Philip Glass Ensemble between 1987 and 2007. He won the American Pianists Association national competition in 1984 and made his New York recital debut the following year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He founded the MayMusic festival in Charlotte in 1993 and served as its director until 1998. In the 1990s and 2000s, Bush performed with a variety of contemporary music groups, including Present Music in Milwaukee (from 1995 to 2010) and the piano quartet Typhoon, which was led by violinist Iwao Furusawa and experienced major success in Japan; Bush played some 250 concerts in Japan with the group and recorded five albums with them in Japan for Sony Classical. In 2001, Bush made his debut at New York's Carnegie Hall, replacing an ailing Peter Serkin in concertos by Stravinsky and Alexander Goehr, and that year, he made his recording debut on the Koch International label, backing soprano Dora Ohrenstein on the album Restless Spirits. From 2000 to 2004, Bush taught piano and chamber music at the University of Michigan. He became music director of the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East in Bennington, Vermont, remaining in that position until 2015. In 2012, Bush joined the faculty at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where he continued to reside as of the early 2020s. Bush has appeared at many festivals, including the Grand Canyon Music Festival, the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, and Music at Blair Atholl in Scotland. He often champions contemporary music in notably diverse forms; The New York Times asserted that he was one of the few pianists who could perform music by Glass and Elliott Carter with equal persuasiveness, but he is also at home in traditional repertory, having recorded Beethoven's complete sonatas for violin and piano with violinist Aaron Berofsky. Bush appeared as accompanist to oboist Alex Klein on several albums on the Cedille Records label in the late 2010s and early 2020s. He returned in 2023 on the Neuma label with the solo album Concord, which included Charles Ives' Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord, Massachusetts").
© James Manheim /TiVo
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Discography

9 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller

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