Igor Kipnis

Igor Kipnis stands out as the foremost American performer on both the harpsichord and the fortepiano. Born while his father, the celebrated Russian bass Alexander Kipnis (1891-1978), was engaged at the Berlin Opera, the younger Kipnis grew up immersed in music as the family followed Alexander’s engagements across Europe for the subsequent eight years. In 1938 the household relocated to the United States after Alexander joined the Metropolitan Opera roster.

Musical aptitude also ran through his maternal lineage; his grandfather Heniot Lévy directed the piano department at Chicago’s American Conservatory and provided Igor with his earliest keyboard instruction. Much of the household’s listening came from Alexander’s extensive 78-rpm collection of Lieder and opera arias. Young Igor himself caught the collecting bug and saved to purchase Edwin Fischer’s five-album set of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, an outlay of ninety dollars that represented a considerable sum in the 1930s. The final volume unexpectedly included two additional 78s featuring Wanda Landowska’s harpsichord performance of the English Suite No. 2, an encounter that ignited his fascination with the instrument.

Although he had already developed strong keyboard technique, Kipnis initially envisioned a career outside performance, majoring in social relations at Harvard with ambitions in radio, television production, or the recording business. While enrolled in a Handel course taught by composer Randall Thompson, he gained his first opportunity to play a harpsichord. As he later recalled, “Nothing happened, however, until 1957, when my parents imported a small instrument for me to fool around with after work.”

At the time he held the position of record librarian at New York’s leading top-40 station WMCA and also prepared liner notes and supervised cover artwork for Westminster Records. Concurrently he pursued harpsichord studies with Thurston Dart. His professional debut as a freelance harpsichordist occurred in 1959, centered chiefly on continuo work and including several recordings of Baroque trumpet repertoire alongside Richard Kapp. These activities quickly expanded into a sustained international career of recording and touring that ultimately yielded more than eighty-one albums, roughly sixty of them devoted to solo repertoire.

He served on the faculties and concert stages of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood from 1964 to 1967, Fairfield University in Connecticut from 1971 to 1977, and the Festival Music Society of Indianapolis, where he also gave his first fortepiano recital. Radio engagements remained a constant: he appeared regularly as a guest on the syndicated program “First Hearing,” hosted WQXR’s “The Age of Baroque” for three years, and presented the nationally distributed series “The Classical Organ.” In addition he prepared several modern editions of Baroque keyboard works and contributed reviews to major American journals.

His harpsichord programs encompass virtually the entire Baroque and Classical literature together with a substantial body of twentieth-century compositions written after the instrument’s revival in the 1920s—works by Falla, Rochberg, Rorem, McCabe, Curtis-Smith, Locklair, Kolb, Salzman, and Richard Rodney Bennett among them. In 1995 he formed the Kipnis-Kushner Piano Duo with Karen Kushner, an ensemble that continues to tour internationally.