Barbara Nissman

Barbara Nissman has earned recognition above all for her interpretations of the keyboard music of Sergey Prokofiev and Alberto Ginastera. She has produced extensive writings on Prokofiev’s compositions, led master classes, and delivered lectures devoted to them; in 1989 she became the first pianist to present the complete cycle of his sonatas across a three-recital series given in both New York and London. Ginastera likewise received her sustained focus and responded by dedicating his final composition, the Third Piano Sonata, to her. Her programs have nevertheless encompassed music by Liszt, Rachmaninov, Bartók, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and numerous additional composers. Appearances have taken her throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand, while orchestral engagements have included the principal ensembles of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Cleveland, many leading European orchestras, and conductors such as Ormandy, Muti, Skrowaczewski, and Slatkin. She served as host for the sixteen-week BBC television series Barbara and Friends, later broadcast on American public television, and has issued numerous recordings, most of them first released on the Pierian label before being reissued on her own imprint, Three Oranges Recordings.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 31 December 1944, Nissman pursued her musical education at the University of Michigan and under the guidance of György Sándor. She encountered Ginastera in 1971 while performing his First Piano Concerto at the university’s contemporary music festival. That same year proved decisive: an Ormandy-sponsored tour of Europe followed, after which she made her debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Thor Johnson in Ann Arbor, Michigan, playing Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody; the next season she appeared again with Ormandy and toured with the orchestra.

In 1976 Ginastera invited her to perform his First Piano Concerto with L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande during his sixtieth-birthday observances in Geneva. Nissman subsequently directed her attention to Prokofiev, whose music she had known since her student days and whose cause she has championed vigorously from the 1980s onward. In 1988 she recorded the complete sonatas and other piano pieces for Newport Classic; the discs appeared the following year to widespread praise. During the 1991–1992 season, marking the centenary of Prokofiev’s birth, she again presented the full sonata cycles across the United States and Europe. In 1998 the Moscow and St. Petersburg conservatories invited her to give recitals and master classes on the composer, and in 2015 she was the featured performer at the dedication of the Prokofiev Archive at Columbia University, with members of the Prokofiev family present.

Her book Bartók and The Piano: A Performer’s View, accompanied by a CD, was issued by Scarecrow Press in 2002. She prepared the critical edition of Ginastera’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and created DVDs examining the music of Prokofiev and of Liszt. Among her recordings are several premieres: Ginastera’s Concierto Argentino, the original version of his Piano Concerto No. 2, and Bartók’s unpublished Piano Sonata of 1898.

In 2008 Nissman, who makes her home in West Virginia, received the state’s Governor’s Distinguished Service to the Arts Award.