Eunice Norton

Eunice Norton (born June 30, 1908 in Minneapolis , Minnesota , † December 9, 2005 in Vienna ) was an American pianist.

Norton studied from 1922 to 1924 at the University of Minnesota with William Lindsay . This introduced her to Myra Hess , who gave her an apprenticeship with the famous music teacher Tobias Matthay in England. In 1927 she received the London Bach Prize and the Chappell Gold Medal .

In the same year she made her debut with the Queen's Hall Symphony Orchestra under Henry Wood , who immediately went on a concert tour with her. During this time she also appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra , the Manchester Symphony Orchestra , the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Hamilton Harty and Adrian Boult .

She gave concerts in Vienna, The Hague; Berlin, Amsterdam, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Budapest and Paris, performed in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra . She made her US debut at Carnegie Hall and premiered several contemporary works at concerts in Town Hall . Sergei Kussewitzki invited her to concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra . Under the direction of Leopold Stokowski , she recorded Paul Hindemith's chamber music No. 2 , and she has performed with the most famous American orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic Orchestra , the Philadelphia Orchestra , the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under conductors such as Issay Dobrowen , Henri Verbrugghen , Eugene Ormandy , Frederick Stock and Fritz Reiner .

From 1931 to 1933, she completed her training with Artur Schnabel in Germany and Italy . A long-term friendship developed from the collaboration. In 1934 Norton married the chemist Bernard Lewis , with whom she settled in Pittsburgh in 1942 and reduced her concert activities. She founded a division of the New Friends of Music in Pittsburgh , which gives concerts in the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland and still exists today under the name Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society . She later founded the Peacham Music Festival in Vermont, where numerous live recordings of her concerts were made. In 1954 she performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under the direction of William Steinberg .

In addition to works by Hindemith, Norton also premiered compositions by Arthur Honegger , Charles Ives and others. She has performed with the American Chamber Orchestra , the Juilliard , Budapest and Curtis String Quartet and played the first radio performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations on American radio.

Norton gave master classes for piano and taught a. a. at the University of Pittsburgh , the Catholic University of America and the University of Minnesota , At Carnegie-Mellon University , where she was visiting professor of piano, a series of lectures on the teaching method of their teacher Matthay was filmed in 1995.