Rebecca Penneys

Rebecca Penneys (born 1946) is an American-born pianist of Russian-Jewish descent. Penneys is a recitalist, chamber musician, orchestral soloist, educator, and adjudicator. In 1965, she was the youngest contestant to have ever entered the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Poland: “A sensational effect was created by the playing of Rebecca Penneys. She is a genius of the piano.”

Rebecca Penneys was born on October 2, 1946. Her mother, Rose Kaplan Penneys (1912–2010), worked for social causes, and her father, Alexander Penneys (1912–1994), was a radiologist. Sol Kaplan, her uncle, was a pianist-conductor-composer, and her cousin, Boris Gorelick, was an artist. Raised as a prodigy, Penneys grew up in Los Angeles studying piano from the age of 3, and dance from the age of 5. Her primary mentors in California were Carmelita Maracci, dance, Victoria Front and Aube Tzerko, piano, and Leonard Stein, composition. She performed her first solo piano recital at the age of 9 and performed as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the age of 11. Other mentors were Rosina Lhévinne and Artur Rubinstein.

Penneys attended Beverly Hills High School and continued her formal education at Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, studying piano with Gyogry Sebok and Menahem Pressler, chamber music with Janos Starker and Josef Gingold, and composition with Iannis Xenakis. She was awarded the unprecedented Special Critics’ Prize at the SeventhInternational Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, an award created in her honor. She was a top prizewinner in the 1975 Second Paloma O'Shea International Piano Competition in Spain. In 1972, she made her New York debut at Alice Tully Hall. The same year she was appointed to the faculty of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. In 1974, she founded the New Arts Trio at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music (with Carol Sindell, violin and Hamilton Cheifetz, cello). The Trio won the Naumburg Award for Chamber Music in 1980 (with Piotr Janowski, violin and Steven Doane, cello). The Trio was Trio-in-Residence at the Chautauqua Institution from 1978 to 2012 and has made two United States Information Agency Cultural State Department tours of Europe in 1985 and 1987. Penneys made a USIS State Department solo tour of Japan in 1980. She has taught and performed in such summer festivals as Sitka, Marlboro, Eastern, Aspen, Vermont Mozart, Montreal, Shawnigan Johannesen, Tel Hai Israel, Peninsula, Roycroft, Mammoth Lakes, Chautauqua, and Music Mountain.

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