THE BOOKS BY ROBERT SILVERMAN─A Prize-Winning Concert Pianist
Exploring Music and History
BIO
For more than six decades, Robert Silverman has occupied a distinctive place in Canadian musical life—as concert pianist, recording artist, teacher, and, more recently, author. He has performed in major concert halls throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. His repertoire includes more than thirty works for piano and orchestra, performed with the Chicago Symphony, Sydney Symphony, BBC Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and every major orchestra in Canada, under conductors including Seiji Ozawa, John Eliot Gardiner, and Kiril Kondrashin. His longstanding commitment to Canadian music has also included the premieres of four piano concertos by Canadian composers.
Recording has been an equally important part of Silverman’s musical life. His unusually large discography ranges from Bach and Mozart to Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann. His ten-CD cycle of the complete Beethoven sonatas was shortlisted for a Juno Award; his Liszt recording received a Grand Prix du Disque from the Liszt Society of Budapest; and his recording of late Chopin works was named Stereophile magazine’s Recording of the Month. Other projects include the complete Mozart piano sonatas for IsoMike and a later series of Beethoven sonatas drawn from live performances.
If anything, Silverman’s musical curiosity has intensified with time. During the pandemic, he immersed himself in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, performing the complete First Book and recording it for Steinway’s Spirio catalogue. The experience led to his first book, a personal exploration of Bach’s 1722 masterpiece, and began a new phase of his life in which performing, recording, writing, and a lifetime of accumulated musical experience increasingly came together.
His latest book, Schumann, Vienna and the Cat, takes that exploration in a still more personal direction. Part memoir and part musical inquiry, it interweaves Schumann’s formative years with Silverman’s own as a young pianist studying in Vienna more than a century later. At its heart are two works that have fascinated him for most of his musical life: Kreisleriana, Op. 16, and Humoreske, Op. 20.
Born in Montreal, Silverman gave his first recital at five and made his concerto debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra at fourteen. Yet becoming a professional musician was by no means inevitable. Only after three years of engineering studies and completing a B.A. in the humanities did he commit himself fully to the piano. Within months he won the Grand Prize in the Canadian Music Competition and received a Canada Council grant for two years of study in Vienna. He later completed his formal musical education at McGill University and the Eastman School of Music.
Success at a string of international competitions—including a bronze medal at the Van Cliburn Competition and sixth prize at the Rio de Janeiro Competition—culminated in the Grand Prize at the Concours Jeunesses Musicales in 1967 and, soon afterward, Silverman’s acclaimed American debut in Washington, D.C.
Silverman spent thirty years on the faculty of the University of British Columbia, including five years as Director of its School of Music. UBC subsequently awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters. In 2013, he was appointed to the Order of Canada. Earlier, he had been the inaugural recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Award for Keyboard Artistry.
A longtime Steinway Artist, Robert Silverman remains as curious about music now as when he first encountered it. After a lifetime of performing, recording, and teaching, writing has given him another way of asking the same questions that have always occupied him: what makes great music inexhaustible, and what can a performer discover in it that he has not discovered before?
RECORDINGS BY ROBERT SILVERMAN
BOOKS BY ROBERT SILVERMAN
