Jeffrey Biegel

Arriving on the scene at a time when an artist's success often came out of nowhere only to shrink just as quickly, pianist Jeffrey Biegel managed to persevere, fashioning a career of steady success studded with concerts at major venues like Avery Fisher Hall and with front-rank ensembles like the Philadelphia Orchestra and Boston Pops. He has appeared on such television programs as Good Morning America, and he also blazed a few trails: in July 1997, Biegel was the first pianist to give a live Internet recital. That same year, he performed the rarely heard original 1924 version of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the Boston Pops, an event covered by ABC television, CNN, and NPR. Biegel's repertory is as bulky as it is eclectic, taking in concertos and solo works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Rachmaninov, among many others, and scores of contemporary composers like Keith Emerson and William Bolcom, including over two-dozen commissioned works. Biegel is also a composer, music editor, and educator. A corrective surgery at age three cured Biegel of deafness and an inability to speak. He studied music at Juilliard with the iconic Adele Marcus. In 1985, Biegel won the William Kappell International Piano Competition, and four years later, he captured first prize at the prestigious Paris-based Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud International Competition. Biegel's first recording was issued in 1993, a Marco Polo disc of César Cui's 25 Preludes, Op. 64 (later reissued on Naxos). Biegel's growing fame was further boosted by his pioneering Internet recital, a CD of which was issued by the Angelok label. In 2000, Biegel premiered Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Millennium Fantasy with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the result of a two-year multiple-orchestra commissioning project. Other such high-profile premieres followed, including Biegel's first performance of Lowell Liebermann's Concerto No. 3 with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra on May 12, 2006. That year, Biegel premiered and recorded the rarely heard and neglected Leroy Anderson Piano Concerto, issued in 2008 on an acclaimed all-Anderson Naxos album. Biegel, no stranger to chamber music, formed Trio21 in 2010 with violinist Kinga Augustyn and cellist Robert deMaine. That year, Biegel was chosen as the first artist to record for the Steinway & Sons label, resulting in the album Bach on a Steinway. The composers who have written works specifically for him include Zwilich, Richard Danielpour (Mirrors, for piano and orchestra), and Jeremy Lubbock (Moods, for piano and strings). Among Biegel's compositions are the choral work The World in Our Hands, written with his nine-year-old (at the time) son Craig, and Three Reflections: Freedom (JFK), Justice (RBG), Equality (MLK), which he premiered in a concerto version in 2022. In 2024, Biegel was heard on the album A Dream So Bright: Choral Music of Jake Runestad, performing that composer's Dreams of the Fallen with the True Concord Voices and Orchestra. Biegel is a member of the piano faculty at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. ~ Robert Cummings & Keith Finke, Rovi