Paul Jacobs (pianist)

Paul Jacobs (June 22, 1930 – September 25, 1983) was an American pianist. He was best known for his performances of twentieth-century music but also gained wide recognition for his work with early keyboards, performing frequently with Baroque ensembles.

Paul Jacobs was born in New York City and attended PS 95 and DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and studied at the Juilliard School, where his teacher was Ernest Hutcheson. He became a soloist with Robert Craft's Chamber Arts Society and played with the Composer's Forum. He made his official New York debut in 1951. Reviewing that concert, Ross Parmenter described him in The New York Times as 'a young man of individual tastes with an experimental approach to the keyboard that he already has mastered.'

He moved to France after his graduation in 1951. There he began his long association with Pierre Boulez, playing frequently in his Domaine musical concerts, which introduced many of the key works of the early twentieth-century to post-war Paris. At a single concert in 1954, which must have lasted close to five hours and also included works by Stravinsky, Debussy and Varèse, Jacobs contributed chamber music by Berg, Webern and Bartók and gave the première of a new work by Michel Philippot. In a 1958 Domaine concert he played a work written for him by the 21-year-old Richard Rodney Bennett, his Cycle 2 for Paul Jacobs.

He acted as rehearsal pianist for the incidental music which Boulez wrote for Jean-Louis Barrault's production of the Oresteia in 1955. Jacobs later said that meeting Boulez had put an end to his own composing ambitions: 'I just gave it up. I wouldn't have dared show anything of mine to Boulez.'

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