Steven Lubin

Steven Lubin
Steven Lubin in 2005
Background information
Born	1942
Genres	Classical music
Instruments	Fortepiano
Website	http://www.stevenlubin.com/

Steven Lubin (born 1942 in Brooklyn) is an American pianist and musical scholar. He is best known for his performances on the fortepiano, the early version of the piano.

Lubin studied piano with Lisa Grad, Nadia Reisenberg, Seymour Lipkin, Rosina Lhévinne and Beveridge Webster, and viola with Florence Nicolaides. He attended New York's Music & Art High School; graduated from Harvard College, majoring in philosophy; he earned a master's degree in piano at the Juilliard School; and he completed his Ph.D. in musicology at New York University, where he wrote a dissertation entitled "Techniques for the Analysis of Development in Middle-Period Beethoven."

A subspecialty of Lubin's is his approach to performing the keyboard works of the Viennese Classical composers (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert) on replicas of the historic instruments actually used by the composers. Such instruments are often generically called fortepianos. In the 1960s, Lubin frequented the New Hampshire workshop of Philip Belt, a pioneering American builder of fortepiano replicas, and became curious how Mozart's piano concertos would have sounded on these instruments in their original performances. In the mid 70's, he built a fortepiano replica of his own, with the help of a piano technician friend, Lee Morton, who had served as Belt's apprentice. At his debut recital at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1977, Lubin performed Mozart works on his fortepiano, along with a large-scale Chopin work on the modern grand. (More recently, he uses instruments by expert builders, particularly those of Rodney Regier of Freeport, ME.)