The musical life of Rebecca Penneys is a wonderful blend of international solo recitals, chamber music performances, and teaching piano students through masterclasses and individual lessons in the United States and abroad. During the school year Penneys teaches at the Eastman School of Music, a professorship she has held since 1980; and every summer since 1977 she has been a resident artist and teacher at the Chautauqua (New York) Institution, where in 1985 she became chairman of the piano department. This year she will present concerts and seminars at the St. Petersburg (Florida) College as the school's visiting artist, and this month the first Penneys Alumni Conference will take place in Rochester, New York where former students from around the globe will gather to perform.
| At age 11 Penneys debuted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and at 18 she received the Special Critics' Prize at the Seventh International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw; she was Top Prize winner in the Second Paloma O'Shea International Piano Competition in Spain. Over the years she studied with such musical giants of the 20th century as Artur Rubinstein, Gyorgy Sebok, Aube Tzerko, Rosina Lhevinne, Gregor Piatigorsky, and Janos Starker. She danced professionally with the San Francisco Ballet as a teenager but finally decided to pursue the piano as a career. |
| Joseph Schildkraut, left, and Franz Waxman listen to Penneys perform music for her debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. |
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In 1974 Penneys founded the New Arts Trio that twice won the Naumburg Award, and since 1978 the ensemble has been trio-in-residence at the Chautauqua Institution.
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Rebecca Penneys at the Marlboro Music Festival of 1976
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For public television she has appeared on the Musical Encounters series, The Piano: Its Sounds and Moods, and was guest editor of a special issue of Seminars in Neurology on music and medicine. Her article “Motion and Emotion” appeared in the 1992 issue of Clavier, and in 1994 she co-authored a book with Raymond Gottlieb, The Fundamentals of Flow in Learning Music. |
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