About the Event

The first performance of Jeffrey Siegel’s 46th season of Keyboard Conversations® at Scottsdale Arts highlights well-loved, popular masterpieces of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, and Debussy. Keyboard Conversations are brilliantly polished concerts with commentary that combine captivating comments with dynamic performances of piano masterpieces. Each concert concludes with a lively question-and-answer session. New listeners discover an informal, entertaining, and instantly accessible introduction to the vast repertoire of the piano and to classical music, in general. Seasoned music lovers discover an enriched, more focused listening experience. 

Jeffrey Siegel 

American pianist Jeffery Siegel has been a soloist with the world’s great orchestras. Abroad, these include the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; London Symphony Orchestra; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Philharmonia Orchestra; Moscow State Symphony Orchestra; Munich’s Bayerischer Rundfunk; the Philharmonic Orchestras of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Oslo, and Stockholm; the Orchestra of La Scala; and NHK Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo. In the United States, engagements have included the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Siegel has collaborated with many of the preeminent conductors of our time and legendary maestros of the past, including Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, Sir Andrew Davis, Charles Dutoit, Neeme Järvi, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Eugene Ormandy, Sir Simon Rattle, Leonard Slatkin, Sir Georg Solti, William Steinberg, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Klaus Tennstedt, Michael Tilson Thomas, and David Zinman. 

A passionate communicator and performer, Siegel also presents Keyboard Conversations. Long-running series continue in London and in numerous American cities, among them New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Palm Desert, Dallas, Denver, and Washington, DC. The loyalty of Siegel’s audiences is heartwarming. In 2024–25, the Scottsdale series marks its 46th season, and the Chicago series celebrates its 56th. 

Siegel has appeared in radio interviews on classical music stations across the United States and has been a frequent guest on the popular BBC program In Tune in the United Kingdom. Keyboard Conversations: Piano Treasures, a Time Life production, has been broadcast by PBS to more than 150 cities nationwide and is available now on DVD. CD releases include The Romantic Music of Chopin; The Miracle of Mozart, recorded live in London; The Power and Passion of Beethoven; The Romanticism of the Russian Soul and The Romance of the Piano (Random House Audio Publishing Group); Music for the Young—and the Young at Heart (WFMT Radio, Chicago); American Pianistic Treasures (WEDU, Tampa); and Spellbinding Bach. Siegel’s recording of Gershwin’s complete works for piano and orchestra, with Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony, continues to be a bestseller and is available on Amazon. 

Born into a musical family, Siegel studied with Rudolf Ganz in his native Chicago, with the legendary Rosina Lhévinne at The Juilliard School, and, as a Fulbright Scholar, with Ilona Kabos in London. Siegel and his wife live in New York. 

“An achievement of a sort seldom heard.” — The New York Times 

“… a pianist with a bravura technique and a big, gorgeous sound … and when the artist himself offers the inside scoop, the musical experience becomes vastly more personal.” — The Denver Post 

“Jeffrey Siegel has everything: massive technique, musical sensitivity and character, wide tonal resources, immense reserves of power, and the ability to communicate.” — Los Angeles Times 

For additional information, please visit Siegel’s website at KeyboardConversations.com. 

Jeffrey Siegel is a Steinway artist. 

Thank you to our 2023–24 Presenting Sponsors: Dr. David and Joan Goldfarb Trust