변화경 은퇴장로님 부군- The Late Russell Sherman 소천

Russell Sherman’s Passing

Russell Sherman, acclaimed as a poet of the keyboard and New England Conservatory’s Distinguished Artist in Residency, died last Saturday. On his passing, New England Conservatory published a statement, which includes a link to Mr. Sherman’s 2015 Commencement Address. Boston Globe also published an article by Jeremy Eichler, portion of which is quoted below.

‘Mr. Sherman made his Town Hall debut in 1945, and at age 15 began study at Columbia University. After graduating in 1949, he was active in New York’s contemporary music circles but by 1959 placed his performance career on hiatus and moved to California. “My training had been terribly involved and intense, yet I felt an uncertainty about myself as an artist,” he explained to The New York Times. “I felt the need to emigrate and develop a coherence of personality.”

He accepted a teaching position at Pomona College and later at the University of Arizona, before finally coming to Boston in 1967 to direct the piano department at New England Conservatory, where he remained on the faculty for over five decades. Over the years, his students have included Craig Smith, Sergey Schepkin, Randall Hodgkinson, Leslie Amper, and Marc-André Hamelin, who described Mr. Sherman as “the greatest inspirer there is.”

His students also included an initially shy Korean pianist named Wha Kyung Byun, who professed to be mystified by Mr. Sherman’s earliest comments about her playing. Nonetheless, she found herself quickly improving. The two were married in 1974.

“Her love, encouragement, tenderness, interest, curiosity, and delight really saved me,’’ Mr. Sherman told the Globe [in 2010], “from my own habits and the capacity I think we all have to become ingrown, to take on a combative posture against the world.’’

Across the 1970s, Mr. Sherman’s renown grew on the strength of a series of remarkable recordings, beginning with Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes,” in which he displayed fresh interpretations alongside an astonishing command of the music’s range of colors. “In music you have to have a good sense of terrain,” he told the Globe, “but you also want to travel, to go places that are unknown and sacred.”

Working against the grain of an era where strict fidelity to the score was often seen as the highest value in interpretation, Mr. Sherman became known for the fantasy and inner life of his playing. “In Sherman’s hands, the piano dreams,” read the headline of one Globe review from 1994. “Mr. Sherman does not repeat the piano repertory, he relives it,” wrote critic Bernard Holland in The New York Times. “And though you may not like all his visions, the spiritual energy behind them is perhaps double that of the average professional.”’