Renowned concert pianist also taught at Juilliard School
Joseph Kalichstein, an Israeli-American pianist who was equally distinguished as a recitalist, a soloist with orchestras and a chamber musician, died March 31 at his home in Maplewood, New Jersey. He was 76.
The Juilliard School, where Kalichstein taught for many years, announced his death. The cause was pancreatic cancer.
Over a career that spanned half a century, Kalichstein presented thoughtful, impassioned and deeply musical performances of the piano repertoire from Bach, Mozart and Brahms through the masters of the early 20th century, including Bartok, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
With his chamber ensemble, the KalichsteinLaredo-Robinson Trio, he went further still and played contemporary works by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Richard Danielpour and Daron Hagen, among others. Several of these pieces were written for the group. Since 1997, Kalichstein had been artistic adviser for chamber music to the Kennedy Center and artistic director of the center’s Fortas Chamber Music Concerts.
During his long history with the Kennedy Center, Mr. Kalichstein appeared with his trio, gave solo recitals and performed with the National Symphony Orchestra, as well as in many other concerts. He had also been a teacher at the Juilliard School since 1983.
Conductor Leonard Slatkin, who knew Mr. Kalichstein from their student days, called him “a musician’s musician, always thoughtful and imaginative.”
“All of us who were at Juilliard with him knew that he would become an important force in the music world,” he continued. “When you coupled those skills with his incredible humanity and sense of humor, the very definition of the word ‘mensch’ leaps to the mind.”
Kalichstein was part of a golden time at Juilliard, studying alongside a remarkable crop of young students who would go on to international fame, including the violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, pianists Emanuel Ax and Misha Dichter, and the conductor James Levine, as well as Slatkin.
Kalichstein was born in Tel Aviv, then part of British mandate of Palestine, on Jan. 15, 1946, and began his studies with a neighbor by the time he was 4.
“I would crawl to the neighbor’s house, my parents told me, because they had a piano,” he recalled in an interview with the Bergen County Record in 2001. “I could read music before I could read letters.”
Yet he never thought of himself as a child prodigy. “I was pretty lazy,” he said. “I didn’t work at it eight hours a day. I wasn’t a wunderkind.”
Looking back, he thought this might have been a good thing. “Some people have a great talent at a young age and they get burnt out,” he told the Record. “It’s a horrible tragedy and I escaped it.”
Although Kalichstein was held in high esteem among his peers, he was remarkably self-effacing, indifferent to publicity, gave interviews sparingly and seemed most devoted