Elan Sicroff

Elan Sicroff (born 1950) is a concert pianist, recording artist, and educator. He is the foremost interpreter of music composed by Thomas de Hartmann (1885–1956) and the spiritualist George Gurdjieff (1866 or 1867–1949).

As a teen, Sicroff trained as a classical pianist at the Juilliard Preparatory School under Jeaneane Dowis, specializing in Bartók. "When I first found Bartók’s music, I was 14," he recalled in a 2010 interview. "My teacher gave me the Three Rondos on Folk Tunes, from Hungary. I was at the Juilliard Preparatory School, and I needed something modern for the final exam of my first year there. I played it through once and I didn’t understand it. The second time, I was addicted. For years, I was playing only Bartók."

He later studied at the Oberlin Conservatory. He attended the International Academy for Continuous Education in Sherborne, UK, directed by John G. Bennett, one of the leading exponents of Gurdjieff's teachings. From 1975 to 1979 he trained with Mme. Olga de Hartmann, the composer's widow. About his training with Mme. de Hartmann, Sicroff said, "Her greatest interest in the interpretation and performance of her husband’s music was that feeling should be transmitted through it. She was unimpressed by fingers running up and down the keyboard, and she would sometimes say things that would irritate me. She would say that none of the pianists on the world stage really played with feeling. This was very hard for me to accept, and it took many years for it to really become clear to me, just what she was talking about."

In 1982, Sicroff undertook a concert tour of the US, introducing de Hartmann's neglected works to a wider audience.

Sicroff has performed at such prestigious concert venues as London’s Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Recital Hall in New York,Bulgaria's National Academy of Music, and Madrid's Muzeum Hudby, as well as with the Santa Fe Symphony. He has also performed at McGill University, Bowdoin College, the University of California, Los Angeles, Smith College, the University of California, Berkeley, Boston's Longy School of Music, the Berklee College of Music, and the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, Ireland.

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