Pinchas Zukerman has remained a phenomenon in the world of music for over four decades. His musical genius, prodigious technique and unwavering artistic standards are a marvel to audiences and critics. Devoted to the next generation of musicians, he has inspired younger artists with his magnetism and passion. His enthusiasm for teaching has resulted in innovative programs in London, New York, China, Israel and Ottawa. The name Pinchas Zukerman is equally respected as violinist, violist, conductor, pedagogue and chamber musician.
Zukerman's 2016-2017 season, his eighth as principal guest conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London and his second as artist-in-association with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, includes more than 100 concerts worldwide. In January 2017, he serves as artistic director of the Winter Festival for three weeks of concerts and educational residency activities with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Guest conducting and soloist engagements include the Cleveland Orchestra and Boston, Pittsburgh and Montreal Symphonies, plus overseas appearances with the Berlin and Israel Philharmonics, Camerata Salzburg, Sydney Symphony, Korean Chamber Orchestra, Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and Miyazaki Festival Orchestra. European recitals with pianist Yefim Bronfman and chamber concerts with the Zukerman Trio round out the season.
Over the last decade, Zukerman has become as equally regarded a conductor as he is an instrumentalist, leading many of the world's top ensembles in a wide variety of the orchestral repertoire's most demanding works. A devoted and innovative pedagogue, Zukerman chairs the Pinchas Zukerman Performance Program at the Manhattan School of Music, where he has pioneered the use of distance-learning technology in the arts. In Canada, where he served as music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra from 1999 to 2015, he established the NAC Institute for Orchestra Studies and the Summer Music Institute encompassing the Young Artists, Conductors and Composers programs. He currently serves as conductor emeritus of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, as well as artistic director of its Young Artist Program.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1948, Zukerman came to America in 1962 where he studied at The Juilliard School with Ivan Galamian. He has been awarded the Medal of Arts, the Isaac Stern Award for Artistic Excellence and was appointed as the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative's first instrumentalist mentor in the music discipline. Zukerman's extensive discography contains more than 100 titles, and has earned him two Grammy Awards and 21 nominations. His complete recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Philips were released in July 2016, in a 22-disc set spanning baroque, classical and romantic concertos and chamber music. Fall 2016 sees the Analekta release of Baroque Treasury with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, cellist Amanda Forsyth and oboist Charles Hamann in works by Handel, Bach, Vivaldi Telemann and Tartini. Other recent releases include Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 and Double Concerto with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and Forsyth, recorded in live performances at Ottawa’s Southam Hall, and an album of works by Elgar and Vaughan Williams with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
