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The American harpsichordist, Rebecca Pechefsky, began her musical career on piano, graduated from Juilliard’s pre-college division, and studying piano with Seymour Lipkin and Piero Weiss among others. She then turned to harpsichord, studying with Louis Bagger, Kenneth Cooper and Raymond Erikson, and attended master-classes by Olivier Baumont, Kenneth Gilbert and Colin Tilney.
Well known in the New York area, Rebecca Pechefsky has performed in such venues as Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Hall, and the 18th-century Morris-Jumel Mansion, where she is co-director of the early-music series Music at Morris-Jumel. She has also participated in the series Bach at Zion. Outside New York she has been heard at the Boston Early Music Festival and in the concert series of the San Diego Harpsichord Society; the Harpsichord Center (Pasadena and Brentwood, California); the Miami Bach Society; the Zoellner Arts Center at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and the Beeville Concert Association in Beeville, Texas. A frequent performer at the American Festival of Microtonal Music, she can be heard on its recent compact discs Early and Odysseus (by Johnny Reinhard). Among other musicians with whom she has collaborated are keyboardists Louis Bagger, Robert Heath, and Joshua Pierce; Baroque violinists Judson Griffin, Robert Mealy, Heidi Powell, Lisa Rautenberg, Theresa Solomon, and Vita Wallace; Baroque cellists Christine Gummere and Carlene Stober; and counter-tenors Drew Minter and Jeffrey Dooley.
Also committed to contemporary music, Rebecca Pechefsky has premiered works by Mary Inwood, Frank J. Oteri, Louis Pelosi, Johnny Reinhard, and Ben Yarmolinsky. Currently organist at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Glendale, Queens, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Erik Ryding, with whom she co-authored the biography of the German conductor Bruno Walter Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere, winner of the 2002 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. She is a founding member of the ensemble Brooklyn Baroque, with Andrew Bolotowsky and David Bakamjian.
Rebecca Pechefsky has recorded for Quill Classics the complete harpsichord music of François d’Agincour (2 CD's), as well as a recital of works by Elias Brunnemüller (c1666-1762), J.S. Bach, and Elisabeth Jacquet de le Guerre (1665-1729). With Andrew Bolotowsky she has recorded sonatas by Johann Ludwig Krebs for Baroque flute and harpsichord (Quill), and with Brooklyn Baroque, she can be heard on "Northern Lights" (Quill Classics), a program of German Baroque works, and "The Pleasures of the French" (Quill Classics), a recital of 18th-century French works. She has recently recorded a recital of works by J.S. Bach and composers who knew him personally--including his pupil Johann Ludwig Krebs, whose extraordinary Partita in A Minor opens with a tribute to another work on the program, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue (BWV 903). Also included here are works by Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch, whose music Bach sold, and Johann Gottfried Walther, Bach's cousin and friend. Her recordings have been played across the USA on NPR stations. |
