Steinway Artist *Rebecca Penneys* is a recitalist, chamber musician, orchestral soloist, educator and adjudicator. For five decades she has been hailed as a pianist of prodigious talent. Rebecca has played throughout the USA, East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South America, Western and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Canada. She is a popular guest artist, keynote speaker and pedagogue nationally and internationally. Her current and former students include prizewinners in international competitions, and hold important teaching posts on every continent. She is Professor of Piano at Eastman since 1980 and is Artist-in-Residence at St. Petersburg College, a position created for her in 2001. In New York she continues as founder-pianist 1997, of the Salon Chamber Music Series, a five-concert series.
Rebecca made her recital debut at age 9, and performed as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra when she was 11. At 17, after winning many young artist competitions in the USA she was awarded the unprecedented Special Critics’ Prize at the Seventh International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, an award created in her honor. Additionally, she won the Most Outstanding Musician Prize at the Fifth Vianna Da Motta International Piano Competition (Portugal) and was top prizewinner in the Second Paloma O’Shea International Piano Competition (Spain). She made her New York Debut in Alice Tully Hall in 1972. In 1974, she founded the acclaimed New Arts Trio that twice won the prestigious Naumburg Award for Chamber Music (New York City). The Trio made two USIS Cultural State Department tours of Europe; Rebecca made a solo USIS State Department tour of Japan in 1980.
Rebecca’s teachers include Aube Tzerko, Leonard Stein, Rosina Lhevinne, Artur Rubinstein, Menahem Pressler, Gyorgy Sebok, Janos Starker, Josef Gingold, and Iannis Xenakis. She has taught and performed in such summer festivals as Sitka, Marlboro, Eastern, Aspen, Vermont Mozart, Montreal, Tel Hai Israel, Shawnigan Johannesen, Peninsula, Roycroft, Mammoth Lakes, Eastern, Music Mountain and Chautauqua.
