Phillip Bush

Pianist Phillip Bush, who also directs festivals, moves with equal ease among chamber works, standard repertory, and a wide spectrum of contemporary pieces while maintaining a distinguished teaching career. Born January 4, 1961, in Ridgewood, New Jersey, to a German mother and a French professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he spent most of his childhood in that city. At the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore he trained under Leon Fleisher, whom he has repeatedly cited as a primary mentor; additional formative experiences awaited him at Canada’s Banff Centre School of Fine Arts, where he studied from 1981 to 1983 and encountered Steve Reich along with other leading contemporary figures. Those contacts led to extended collaborations: Bush performed with the Steve Reich and Musicians ensemble between 1996 and 2008 and appeared periodically with the Philip Glass Ensemble from 1987 to 2007. After claiming first prize in the American Pianists Association national competition in 1984, he gave his New York recital debut the next year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1993 he established the MayMusic festival in Charlotte and guided it until 1998. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s he collaborated with several contemporary ensembles, among them Present Music in Milwaukee from 1995 to 2010 and the piano quartet Typhoon, directed by violinist Iwao Furusawa; the latter group achieved notable popularity in Japan, where Bush participated in roughly 250 concerts and recorded five albums for Sony Classical.

His 2001 Carnegie Hall debut occurred when he substituted for an indisposed Peter Serkin in concertos by Stravinsky and Alexander Goehr; that same year he made his first recording for Koch International, accompanying soprano Dora Ohrenstein on Restless Spirits. Between 2000 and 2004 he instructed piano and chamber music at the University of Michigan. He also assumed the music directorship of the Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East in Bennington, Vermont, a post he held until 2015. In 2012 he joined the faculty of the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where he has remained into the early 2020s.

Festival appearances have taken him to the Grand Canyon Music Festival, the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, and Music at Blair Atholl in Scotland. The New York Times has observed that few pianists match his ability to render works by Glass and Elliott Carter with comparable conviction, yet he remains equally committed to traditional repertory, as demonstrated by his complete recording of Beethoven’s violin-and-piano sonatas with violinist Aaron Berofsky. In the late 2010s and early 2020s he served as accompanist to oboist Alex Klein on multiple Cedille Records releases, then issued the solo album Concord on the Neuma label in 2023, featuring Charles Ives’ Piano Sonata No. 2 (“Concord, Massachusetts”).