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For 23 years, Morse Recital Hall has welcomed internationally celebrated pianists to its stage as part of a concert series bearing legendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz’s name.

The Horowitz Piano Series will begin its 2023-2024 season on Oct. 18. Under the artistic direction of Boris Berman, a professor in the practice of piano, the series consists of monthly concerts spotlighting School of Music faculty pianists and other world-renowned guest artists. This year’s series will feature performances by pianists Emmanuel Ax and Hélène Grimaud and faculty pianists Berman, Robert Blocker, Wei-Yi Yang MUS ’04, Melvin Chen ’91 and Boris Slutsky.

“The piano recital, by the virtue of the form, is a very intimate experience,” Berman said.  “It’s an encounter with an artist — one singular artist on stage — and they share their vision of music through intimate communication.”

With the exception of the COVID-19 shutdown, the series has run every year since its establishment in 2000 — according to Berman, the Horowitz Piano Series might be the only continuously running piano recital series in the country.

Michael Friedmann, a professor emeritus of music who served on the School of Music faculty from 1985 to 2020, has attended almost every Horowitz Piano Series concert since its inception and said he always “avidly looks forward to each.” 

He cited an “almost always full-capacity” turnout in Morse Recital Hall each year as evidence of the following the series has garnered — and of the stability of music lovers in the Yale and New Haven communities. 

The series is named after pianist Vladimir Horowitz, considered one of the greatest pianists of all time, who left his papers with Yale before he died.

Horowitz and Yale

In 1986, Horowitz and his wife, Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, decided to donate Horowitz’s personal collection to Yale. Its contents, which fill 164 boxes that reside in the Gilmore Music Library, include papers that “reflect the life and work” of the pianist and 218 discs of unpublished live recordings from Horowitz’s 1940s and 1950s Carnegie Hall recitals. Horowitz used these private recordings to study and evaluate his own performances.

The discs were copied onto tape by Yale’s Collection of Historical Sound Recordings, where they are now housed. Together, they represented the first discography of Horowitz’s private recordings — known as the “Yale Collection.”

Horowitz’s first performance at Yale was a recital in Woolsey Hall in 1966. He returned in 1968, one year before a five-year withdrawal from public performances, then performed a final time in Woolsey in 1980.

But Horowitz’s relationship with Yale extends beyond those three public performances. Daniel DiMaio ’74, now a professor of genetics at the School of Medicine, shared his experience as a Yale student with the legendary pianist with the News.

In 1972, John J. E. Palmer, the dean of Silliman College, chanced upon Horowitz at a party hosted by novelist William Styron. After meeting Horowitz, Palmer invited the pianist to become an associate fellow of Silliman College — “a total coincidence,” said DiMaio — which Horowitz accepted.

That year, Horowitz visited Yale for a conversation with a small number of students, including DiMaio, at Silliman College. According to DiMaio, Horowitz discussed plans to return to Yale to present a lecture-concert, but those plans never materialized.

DiMaio, a longtime fan of Horowitz, decided to take action. After obtaining the pianist’s address from the dean’s office, he reached out to Horowitz himself. A series of letters, phone calls and a telegram ensued, and before long, DiMaio had a date for a private recital from the “most famous pianist of all time,” he said, who, plagued by depression and performance anxiety, had not performed for the public in five years.

Horowitz insisted to DiMaio that only students in Silliman College, not faculty nor School of Music students, could come to hear him perform. On May 5, 1974, DiMaio and 30 other Silliman students traveled to Horowitz’s home in New York, where they were greeted by Wanda Horowitz before taking seats in their living room. 

“I was sitting literally five feet away from [Horowitz],” DiMaio said. “For classical music fans, it’s equivalent to going to Taylor Swift’s house for a concert in her living room.”

Horowitz performed a program of Clementi, Schumann, Chopin and Scriabin for the Yale students. DiMaio described how the pianist initially seemed “tense” but “relaxed” as the group of students showed their appreciation after each piece.

Two days later, DiMaio learned through national news that Horowitz would play for the public again. On May 12, just one week after his private recital for the Yale students, Horowitz performed a “flabbergastingly” triumphant return in Severance Hall in Cleveland — the “General MacArthur of piano has returned,”  the New York Times announced. 

“I think he saw us as a trial run,” DiMaio said. “Somewhere in the back of his mind, there was a kernel of ‘if this goes well, maybe I’ll perform again.’ And it went very well. We were very appreciative. So he decided to strike while the iron was hot. I’d like to think that we were the catalyst that made that happen.”

Last year, Berman received the program notes Horowitz distributed in the recital DiMaio described. The program notes sit framed in his office, and Horowitz’s signature is scrawled in the bottom left corner.

The pieces are listed in the same order Horowitz performed them in Cleveland, and each is accompanied by a description of the work. Berman told the News he believes the recital was what spurred the celebrated pianist out of his retirement cycle.

To DiMaio, Horowitz’s donations to Yale were a “sign of his enduring affection” for the University.

He likened Horowitz to Bob Dylan and Babe Ruth as “immortal” — “the best of his era, maybe of all time,” he said, and he noted that the Horowitz Series is a way to honor his legacy.

“Part of the university’s job is to keep alive what’s best from the past,” DiMaio said. “I think part of our responsibility is to make sure people respect the past, honor the past while making new discoveries and leaving them for the future. But part of leaving for the future is knowing what happened in the past. I hope people who don’t know who Horowitz was will see the name [of the Horowitz Series] and ask, ‘Who is this guy?’”

Horowitz Piano Series inception

Robert Blocker, a professor of piano, served as dean of the School of Music from 1995 to 2023. He recalled trying to find a way to acknowledge Horowitz’s legacy and his gifts to the school, ultimately deciding on a piano series.

He asked Berman, a world-renowned pianist who has served as a professor at the School of Music since 1984, to be the artistic director of the new Horowitz Piano Series.

“As our leader, our world-class pianist and scholar, and most importantly, our teacher, he was the ideal person to head the series,” Blocker said.

In the series’ inaugural season in 2000, Blocker said he decided that the series would be performed on Horowitz’s personal Steinway, which served him for decades in his New York home and gained fame for accompanying him on his tours. A crane would load the black, 990-pound Steinway and float it from his sixth-story studio to the sidewalk ahead of tours.

The storied piano found its way to Yale through Elaine Toscanini MUS ’55, Wanda Horowitz’s niece-in-law. Owned by the University, the piano is now currently on loan to the Steinway company. It will be displayed in Yale’s Morris Steinert Collection of Musical Instruments once the gallery reopens after renovation.

“You walk in, and you put your hand on [the piano], and you’re thinking, my God, this is unbelievable — Horowitz has played this piano, this was his instrument,” Blocker said. “I find inspiration, continuity in that.”

Blocker described the piano as “very difficult to control because of its fast action.” But he and the faculty had decided not to make adjustments to the piano in order to preserve the state Horowitz used it in, so they have not performed on the piano often since its inaugural series.

Berman said he tries to balance inviting “big stars with some lesser-known stars” for each year’s series. Since its opening season, the series has welcomed a wide array of world-renowned guest artists: among them Peter Serkin, Emanuel Ax, Yefim Bronfman, Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, Fou Ts’ong, Olga Kern, Angela Hewitt and Garrick Ohlsson.

The 2023-2024 season and beyond

On Oct. 18, Blocker will open this year’s season in Morse Recital Hall with pieces by Scarlatti, Schubert, Beethoven and Ginastera. To Blocker, programming is a “personal issue.” He said that “looking for connections to where we live and work” is important in deciding what he wishes to present to an audience.

On Nov. 8, Berman will perform a program with pieces by Debussy, Mozart, Prokofiev and Schoenberg. 

Composing a concert program is “art in itself,” according to Berman. Each performer approaches programming differently, and each concert calls for a different approach to programming. Sometimes, he said he wants a monograph program of one composer; other times, he wants as much contrast as possible.

“Those who will follow the whole [Horowitz] Series will see these differing concepts of programming,” Berman said. “The program reflects the personality of the performance.”

On Dec. 8, Wei-Yi Yang will perform the third concert on the series. Yang said he is taking the “road less traveled” with his program, performing music from Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu and late Scriabin works, hoping that they will complement music from more canonical composers.

While Yang said it is impossible to overvalue the canons — Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Bach, he listed — he finds it “stimulating” to create a new context both for less played music that does not fit the traditional concept of classical style and for underrepresented composers whose music was “unjustly unheard.”

“Especially in a series where the only instrument is the piano, it’s important to show the variety and scope of classical music — the performance practice, the context, the idea of sonority, of harmonic, varies so much from style to style,” Yang said.

But two performers choosing the same, canonical piece also provides an opportunity for audiences to experience this variation. A contained series like the Horowitz Series, he said, offers an “efficient” way for audiences to find “variations and differing point of views” — by hearing one concept to the next, it allows them to create their own view of how broad the listening experience can really be.

Yang said that encountering “variation” in performances is integral to his concept of music.

“Words can only do so much. Then, music speaks and translates for us; it’s completely personal and individual,” Yang said. “One person can latch on to certain aspects and the next person would hear different things that would take them to different places, remember different times, imagine different narratives.”

This individuality finds its form within the different ways audience members create narratives and recall memories upon listening to the same music. 

Michael Friedmann, a professor emeritus of music, said he believes classical music is in a period of transition in terms of “finding its proper level and niche of audience” — a confrontation which he thinks the Horowitz Series embraces.

“I think that the performers are always trying to reach out to make their music salient for the current audience — those that are in attendance and those that could be in the future in attendance,” Friedmann said. “All of the performers on this series give conscious and focused thought to the issues of expanding the audience. And the results speak for themselves.”

While Blocker is cautious of losing focus on having a series “honoring one of the greatest pianists and the massive amounts of literature for pianists,” he said that transition has always been a part of classical music — and that musicians should embrace change, “new sounds,” and “new ways of creating and presenting music.” 

The Horowitz Series does not try to pinpoint a certain period, and performers frequently perform new commissioned works, Blocker said.

Through the Horowitz Series, Yang said he hopes to imbue the value of live music in the next generation.

“Sometimes, people think about classical music as easy to put in an attic because it’s in the past, but it’s repertoire that’s constantly being renewed because we have live performances that bring new light, interpretation, and perspective,” Yang said. “The listener is not passive [in these concerts] — the listener also participates and creates this synergy that is interfaced between the public and the performer.”

Faculty pianist Melvin Chen will perform the fourth concert Jan. 24. Then, Hélène Grimaud will perform Bach’s Chaconne along with Beethoven and Brahms the following week. Emanuel Ax will perform Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata and music by Schoenberg on Feb. 28. 

On March 27, faculty pianist Boris Slutsky and his former student, Eric Zuber, will close out the Series with a two-piano program commemorating Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 150th birthday.

Tickets for the concerts start at $17. Yale faculty and staff can purchase tickets for $12, and students can buy them for $8.