Russell Sherman, luminous pianist and longtime New England Conservatory teacher, dies at 93

Acclaimed as a poet of the keyboard, Mr. Sherman was a pianist of arresting insight, majestic technique, and transfiguring grace. In his prime, he was compared with 20th-century luminaries such as Maurizio Pollini and Alfred Brendel.

But with a self-described “anti-career bias,” Mr. Sherman ultimately chose a quieter path devoted principally to the study and teaching of his art. In interviews, in his own writing, and in his approach to performance, Mr. Sherman conveyed an almost mystically contented vision of the piano as refuge, as a source of bottomless fascination, and as a gateway to that exalted domain of the spirit that was music itself. Liszt and Beethoven were cornerstones of his repertoire, and he often performed their music with a combination of high seriousness, inspired fantasy, and a kind of proprietary rapture.

Mr. Sherman, who had many private students, began teaching at New England Conservatory 1967, and in his later years remained a distinguished artist in residence.

“By his very presence here in Boston over the decades, he has become an artistic conscience for us all,’’ the composer Gunther Schuller told the Globe in 2010. “He is the upholder of the highest standards of artistic integrity, and what it means to be and remain a true, genuine artist, despite the constant temptations of the musical marketplace. He is an eternal thinker and learner, and he is always opening his mind to new things.

"If it weren’t such a dirty or meaningless word in our culture, I would call him a great philosopher.”

Despite keeping his distance from the conventional concerto circuit — a career track pianist Glenn Gould once described as “gladiatorial” — Mr. Sherman appeared with most of the country’s major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Over the years, he appeared 13 times with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in works by composers ranging from Franz Liszt to John Harbison. He was also a prolific recording artist and the first American pianist to record the complete sonatas and piano concertos of Beethoven. In 1997, a collection of Mr. Sherman’s writings was published as “Piano Pieces.” In it he reflected on everything from piano technique to the art of teaching — yet most of all on music itself as “the province of the great truths that prepare for life and death.”

Locally, Mr. Sherman performed most often as a recitalist, and his Boston appearances, which extended well into his 80s, were keenly anticipated events for pianophiles, critics, and the public at large.

“One can ‘explain’ the success of these performances by mentioning the solidity of Sherman’s technique, the malleability of his sound, the mastery of short and long spans of rhythm, the audaciously vivid use of the pedal, the extraordinary dynamic range,” wrote Globe critic Richard Dyer reviewing one 1993 performance. “Then there is Sherman’s grasp of musical and dramatic issues, his story-telling imagination, his fascination with the role quirk plays in our lives, and the concentration that never wavers until the last sound has faded away. And still we were left with great, satisfying mysteries, for Sherman did indeed cast a spell.”

Mr. Sherman was born March 25, 1930, and raised in New York and began his piano study at age 6. At 11, while still a self-described “unruly brat,” he was admitted into the piano studio of Eduard Steuermann, a distinguished Austrian émigré musician who had himself been a student of the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the mystically inclined keyboard master Ferruccio Busoni. It was a formative education that spanned 15 years.

“Steuermann trained me in music, in life, in thought, in feeling, and in sensibility,” Mr. Sherman told the Globe in 2010, adding that his teacher also encouraged his students to express their own distinctive personalities as interpreters. “Steuermann once said, ‘you know one Rubinstein is enough.’” He also imparted a sense of what Mr. Sherman called “the primacy of the ear,” the ability to hear sound in an infinite variety of colors and shades. That breadth of approach to sonority on the piano would become one of Mr. Sherman’s interpretive hallmarks.

Mr. Sherman made his Town Hall debut in 1945, and at age 15 began study at Columbia University. After graduating in 1949, he was active in New York’s contemporary music circles but by 1959 placed his performance career on hiatus and moved to California. “My training had been terribly involved and intense, yet I felt an uncertainty about myself as an artist,” he explained to The New York Times. “I felt the need to emigrate and develop a coherence of personality.”

He accepted a teaching position at Pomona College and later at the University of Arizona, before finally coming to Boston in 1967 to direct the piano department at New England Conservatory, where he remained on the faculty for over five decades. Over the years, his students have included Craig Smith, Sergey Schepkin, Randall Hodgkinson, Leslie Amper, and Marc-André Hamelin, who described Mr. Sherman as “the greatest inspirer there is.”

His students also included an initially shy Korean pianist named Wha Kyung Byun, who professed to be mystified by Mr. Sherman’s earliest comments about her playing. Nonetheless, she found herself quickly improving. The two were married in 1974.

“Her love, encouragement, tenderness, interest, curiosity, and delight really saved me,’’ Mr. Sherman told the Globe [in 2010], “from my own habits and the capacity I think we all have to become ingrown, to take on a combative posture against the world.’’

Across the 1970s, Mr. Sherman’s renown grew on the strength of a series of remarkable recordings, beginning with Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes,” in which he displayed fresh interpretations alongside an astonishing command of the music’s range of colors. “In music you have to have a good sense of terrain,” he told the Globe, “but you also want to travel, to go places that are unknown and sacred.”

Working against the grain of an era where strict fidelity to the score was often seen as the highest value in interpretation, Mr. Sherman became known for the fantasy and inner life of his playing. “In Sherman’s hands, the piano dreams,” read the headline of one Globe review from 1994. “Mr. Sherman does not repeat the piano repertory, he relives it,” wrote critic Bernard Holland in The New York Times. “And though you may not like all his visions, the spiritual energy behind them is perhaps double that of the average professional.”

That spiritual energy remained undimmed even into his 80s, even as Mr. Sherman’s public appearances grew more rare. In his later years, while staying true to a childhood obsession with baseball and other sports, Mr. Sherman largely projected the image of a contented Thoreau-like figure who needed little more than 88 keys to sense the full range of human experience. “I always had the feeling as a pianist, I don’t have to go to the mountain,” he said. “The mountain is coming to me.”

In addition to his wife, Mr. Sherman leaves Edward and Mark, two sons from an earlier marriage.

A celebration of Mr. Sherman’s life, at New England Conservatory next year, will be announced. Burial will be at noon Thursday in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Working with students uncertain of their career futures, Mr. Sherman often counseled them to simply follow their bliss, advice he had clearly made his own. “There is an exhilaration, an intoxication, an ecstasy, associated with just hearing music in one’s head, in one’s heart,” he once said. “It doesn’t even mean you have to be playing it. You’re dreaming it . . . To be surrounded always, is to be lifted up.”

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeremy.eichler@globe.com, or follow him @Jeremy_Eichler.