Sidney Foster

Sidney Foster, born Sidney Earl Finkelstein on May 23, 1917, in Florence, South Carolina, was an American pianist, teacher, and Broadway performer who died on February 7, 1977, at the age of 59. The son of Louis Finkelstein and Anna Diamond, he began playing popular tunes by ear on the piano at age four, having heard them on the radio.

The family relocated to Miami, Florida, in 1925, where Foster studied with Earl Chester Smith, a faculty member at the University of Miami. Two years later, his mother brought him to New York City to audition for Josef Hofmann, then Director of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Hofmann accepted him at age ten, making Foster the youngest student admitted to the institution at that time. At Curtis, he was initially placed in the studio of David Saperton, Hofmann's assistant and the son-in-law of pianist Leopold Godowsky. After working to strengthen his music-reading skills with a secondary teacher, Foster was assigned to Isabelle Vengerova, with whom he studied for two years. He subsequently left Curtis for a period, studying with Arthur Newstead in New York and then with Walter Goldstein in New Orleans for three years, before returning to Curtis in 1934. He studied again with Saperton until his graduation in 1938.

In 1938, Foster won the MacDowell Competition. In October 1940, he became the first recipient of the Edgar M. Leventritt Award, which led directly to his debut with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall under conductor John Barbirolli. For that debut, Foster performed Beethoven's C Minor Concerto and composed his own cadenza for the first movement. The New York Times covered the event under the headline "Ovation to Foster." A few months later, he made his New York solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall. Throughout the 1940s, Foster appeared on New York City stages more than a dozen times, including eight solo Carnegie Hall recitals and additional performances with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium and under conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos.

It was during this same period that Foster appeared on Broadway, performing in the 1945 musical Polonaise. His stage work complemented an already active concert schedule during one of the most productive decades of his career.

Also in the 1940s, Foster premiered Norman Dello Joio's First and Second Piano Sonatas and his Prelude: To a Young Musician. In 1944, at the suggestion of his management, he founded a flute, piano, and cello trio with French flutist René Le Roy and Hungarian cellist Janos Scholz. The ensemble commissioned works from Dello Joio and Bohuslav Martinu, which were premiered at New York City's Town Hall in 1944 and 1945, respectively. Foster also composed two trios for the group, attributing the first to the pseudonym Eudoro Silvera and appending his own name to the second. The Martinu work went on to become an enduring part of the chamber music literature. The trio disbanded after two years. On a few occasions Foster composed small works for his New York audiences under a pen name, though for a January 1946 recital he programmed a work under his own name.

In October 1939, Foster married Bronja Singer, a fellow student of Saperton's. The couple had two sons, Lincoln and Justin, born in 1942 and 1945, respectively.

Foster's performing career extended across four decades and took him throughout the United States as well as to Europe, the Soviet Union, Israel, and Japan. He performed with major American orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony at Ravinia under William Steinberg, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Boston Symphony under Aaron Copland — with whom he gave the Boston premiere of Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3 in 1965 — the Houston Symphony, the Minneapolis Symphony, the Utah Symphony under Maurice Abravanel, the Indianapolis Symphony under both Fabian Sevitsky and Izler Solomon, and the Dallas Symphony under Jacques Singer. In 1955, following a recital in Racine, Wisconsin, Foster suffered a significant heart attack that required extended hospitalization and kept him from the concert stage for more than two years. He returned to Carnegie Hall in 1959. In 1962, he toured Japan, performing recitals, concertos with orchestra, and chamber music with violinist Toshiya Eto. During the 1960s he also performed in London, Holland, Germany, and Israel. In November 1964, he toured the Soviet Union, giving sixteen concerts — comprising three programs and four concertos — over twenty-two days.

Foster's 1970 New York recital, which included works by Hummel, Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin, Moszkowski, Paderewski, Homann, and Delibes-Dohnanyi, was noted by New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg as part of what was being called the Romantic Revival. Schonberg wrote that Foster played the repertoire with the charm, flexibility, singing tone, and rhythmic momentum associated with an earlier generation of pianists. Foster continued to perform into the mid-1970s, giving his last concert a little more than a month before his death.

Alongside his performing career, Foster maintained an active teaching life. He taught at Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1949, and in 1952 was hired by Dean Wilfred C. Bain to join the faculty at Indiana University, where he remained until his death in 1977. At Indiana University, he received the Frederich Bachman Lieber Award in 1975 and was named Distinguished Professor in 1976, a designation the university identified as its ultimate professional rank. His Curtis Institute classmates and childhood friends, concert pianists Abbey Simon and Jorge Bolet, joined him on the Indiana University faculty for several years. In 1972, the three gave solo recitals on successive weeks at Lincoln Center's Tully Hall to benefit the Indiana University Music School Scholarship Fund, a series the New York Times titled "Three Pianists Who Teach."

In 1962, Foster was diagnosed with Agnogenic Myeloid Metaplasia, a bone marrow disease also later known as myelofibrosis with myeloid metaplasia.