Concert Pianist

“Silberstein plays … with power, polish, and conviction.”

Mark Lehman, American Record Guide

A Lifetime of Love for the Piano

the flyer for my 1993 New York debut

I have loved the piano for as long as I can remember. My grandmother was a very fine amateur pianist, and I was entranced every time I heard her play—whether it was Chopin and Beethoven or songs from Sesame Street that she sight-read just for me. I remember trying to imitate her on my parents’ piano and growing frustrated as only a three-year-old can when I found I couldn’t make the piano produce anything resembling music.

My father taught me how to read notes, and I began taking lessons with a local teacher when I was six. I had lots of passion but not a lot of skill. When I was thirteen, my teacher recommended I study with an active concert pianist who could polish my technique. I won a small studio competition at a summer festival in Italy when I was 17. I made my New York debut at 19, and recorded my first CD, for Connoisseur Society Records, when I was 20. And that recording made it onto Peter Rabinowitz’s 1996 Want List in Fanfare.

A Champion for Neglected Masterpieces

I played and loved all the classics: Chopin nocturnes, Bach toccatas, Liszt tone poems. But I especially loved the pieces no one else was performing. There were very few recordings of Ernest Bloch’s majestic Piano Sonata when I included it on my New York debut. And I had very different ideas about the piece than the pianists in those recordings. So when Connoisseur Society offered me a recording contract, I decided to record the Bloch myself. Critic Paul Turok wrote that I performed this “powerful but singularly intractable work more convincingly than any other pianist who has recorded it.”

That first recording also included two gorgeous pieces by the Italian-American composer Vittorio Giannini. They had been written in the 1940s and 1950s but had never been recorded. I learned that much of Giannini’s work was unpublished and began an ongoing quest to find and publicize his music. I have also recorded world premieres by Peter Mennin (president of Juilliard from 1963–83) and Norman Lloyd (dean of Oberlin from 1963-65). My most recent CD was of short pieces by the great American composer Vincent Persichetti. I am currently preparing to record world premieres of Paul Creston’s 3 Narratives and pieces from his Rhythmicon.

A Pianist for Today’s Composers

I love working with living composers as much as I love unearthing music that has slipped through the cracks. Recent collaborators include the noted choral composer William Ringham, who hired me to make recordings of his Patterns for Piano to submit to publishers, and Elizabeth Rudolph, whose opera Imogen I music-directed in November 2019. I welcome inquiries from composers!