Performance

Pianist

Born in 1974, Warshaw began her piano studies at age three with her mother, Ruti Hadass Warshaw. A significant early mentor was the legendary pianist and teacher Nadia Reisenberg, who was also instrumental in encouraging Warshaw’s early compositional endeavors. She continued to study piano with Ruti Warshaw until the age of seventeen, also receiving piano lessons from Richard Goode, Martin Canin and Yocheved Kaplinsky.

As a pianist, Warshaw has performed widely as both soloist and chamber player, in venues as diverse as Avery Fisher Hall, Miller Theater, Alice Tully Hall and the Stone, her repertoire ranging from the piano concerti of Mozart, Schumann and Grieg to her own compositions. Appearing as soloist in the premiere of Conjuring Tristan, her “narrative concerto for piano and orchestra,” with the Grand Rapids Symphony in 2015, she was described by the Grand Rapids Press as “a graceful and sensitive pianist [and] an intriguing orchestrator who draws a wealth of colors from an ensemble.” In addition, she soloed with the Rockland Symphony, Cheyenne Symphony, and the Misgav Chamber Players under the direction of Lukas Foss, and has performed numerous chamber recitals with artists including acclaimed cellist Wendy Warner, soprano Nancy Allen Lundy, and mezzo-soprano Re’ut Ben Ze’ev. Warshaw has also performed her piano works on series such as the KeyedUp Music Project, Cutting Edge Concerts, Ensemble for These Times, and the “Here and Now” Series at Bargemusic, most recently the premiere of her seven-movement Different Loves, A Cycle of Classical Portraits in 2021.

Warshaw’s CD, Invocations, was released in January 2011 and is available on Albany Records. This recording allowed her to feature and reconcile diverse aspects of her musical identity — composer, pianist, and thereminist.

Selected Piano Performances

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Thereminist

“She played with unassuming grace … The music was unearthly…This is the kind of concert that 2013 was supposed to have…”

—San Francisco Chronicle, June 2013

Having studied theremin with the renowned Clara Rockmore from an early age, composer and performer Dalit Warshaw has appeared as thereminist with such ensembles as the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, performing in such spaces as Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall, Disney Hall, Alice Tully Hall and David Geffen Hall. In June 2013, her ensemble works for theremin were featured on the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Music Series, for which she performed as guest soloist. In October 2016, she joined the NY Festival of Song’s Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, along with singers Dina Kuznetsova and Shea Owens, in presenting “Of Song From Russia to Riverside Drive,” in conjunction with the New York Philharmonic.

Her CD, Invocations, was released in January 2011 and is available on Albany Records. Along with providing a diverse representation of her compositional language, this disc integrates the theremin with acoustic ensembles in ways that exhibit the more lyrical, vocal and expressive capacities of this unusual instrument, and that reveal its limitless ways of blending and interacting with different timbral combinations. On it, she performs on a unique and profoundly historical instrument: Clara Rockmore’s theremin, which was built and customized to her specifications by its inventor, Lev Termen, in the early 1930s, and on which she last performed in 1993.

Warshaw has also been a frequent champion of her colleagues’ music, debuting theremin parts of composers such as Derek Bermel and David Del Tredici, also performing the American premiere of Andrew Norman’s “Air” for theremin and orchestra with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in January 2012.

A full-time member of the composition faculty at the Boston Conservatory from 2004 to 2014 and former composition faculty at the Juilliard School Extension and Pre-College, she currently serves as Adjunct Professor of Composition at Brooklyn College (CUNY).

Selected Theremin Performances

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