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The American American violinist, conductor and music pedagogue, Lewis Kaplan, obtained his Bachelor of Music degree (1958) and his Master of Music degree (1960) from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. He studied there violin with Ivan Galamian, one of the greatest violin pedagogues of the 20th Century, and conducting with Jean Morel.
Lewis Kaplan made his debut at Town Hall, New York in 1961. He has appeared as violin soloist and as a conductor in Europe, Asia, and North America. In 1961, he founded the Aeolian Chamber Players - the first permanent chamber ensemble of mixed timbre and a model for hundreds of ensembles internationally that followed his pioneering work. He has made chamber music and conducting appearances with violinists Michael Rabin, Jaime Laredo, Szymon Goldberg, Ruggiero Ricci; pianists Richard Goode, Rudolf Firkusny, Murray Perahia, Yefim Bronfman, Horacio Gutierrez, and many others. He has premiered more than 100 works, both as a soloist and with the Aeolian Chamber Players, by most of the well-known composers worldwide, including two by George Crumb. He has made numerous television and radio appearances across the world. He has recorded for the Columbia/CBS Masterworks (Sony), CRI, Folkways, and Odyssey Records labels.
KaplanLewisKnown as an extraordinarily gifted teacher with a remarkable talent for helping to build careers for his highly gifted students. He began teaching at the Juilliard School of Music on the Pre-College faculty in 1964 and has been a Juilliard faculty member since 1976. Presently he is a Senior Professor in violin and chamber music. He has also been on the faculty at Mannes School of Music in New York City since 1986/1987. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music in London since 1998, and an honorary professor at the Xi'an Conservatory of Music in China. He has presented master classes at most of the well-known conservatories and schools worldwide, including the Mozarteum Summer Academy in Salzburg, Austria where he taught for 20 years (1987-2007). His chamber and violin students have included Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Pinchas Zukerman, Kyung-Wha Chung. He has served on the juries of numerous international competitions, including the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, Fritz Kreisler in Vienna, Mozart International in Salzburg, Japan International in Tokyo and Sendai in Japan, Joachim in Hannover, Naumburg and Concert Artists Guild in New York and Henryk Szeryng International in Monaco.
Lewis Kaplan also co-founded the Bowdoin International Music Festival in 1964. He was the Artistic Director of the festival from 1964 and the Director from 1975 until 2014. In 2016, he co-founded and was named Artistic Director of the Portland Bach Festival in Portland, Maine, renamed in 2018 as Bach Virtuosi Festival (BVF).
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Lewis Kaplan has received numerous grants from Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts. In 2009, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany by the President of Germany. He was the holder of the William Schuman Scholar’s Chair at The Juilliard School in 2010-2011.
Lewis Kaplan married Adria Goodkin on August 6, 1961. The have a son and a daughter and currently reside on the Upper West Side in New York City. |
