Huntington Grad Studying at Royal College of Music
Last summer Richie Liebowitz worked with the Blue Devil marching band during its summer training activities as a field and music tech. This fall the 2004 Huntington High School grad is on a fellowship at the Royal College of Music in London, studying piano accompaniment.
Joan Fretz, Huntington’s director of fine and performing arts, called Mr. Liebowitz “one of our most talented music graduates,” and rightly so. While at Huntington he was first chair trombone in all of the bands and orchestra, a member of the marching band, a talented singer and composer, too.
“He was an All-State and All-Eastern musician, has perfect pitch and is one of the most modest and kind people you will ever meet,” Ms. Fretz said. Mr. Liebowitz, who graduated earlier this year from Syracuse University, worked for several years in the OOMPAH summer arts program in Huntington.
“Richie contributed a great deal to our program while he was in high school,” Ms. Fretz said. “He performed in all of our groups as well as the plays and also accompanied many of our students for their recitals and All-State auditions.”
“I've started my two-year course for my graduate studies in piano accompaniment at the Royal College of Music, located right across the street from Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington, London,” Mr. Liebowitz said last week. “I auditioned for the RCM not expecting at all to be accepted. I did my audition at Juilliard, where I had to bring two friends from Syracuse who would perform as soloists while I accompanied, followed by an interview. It was incredibly nerve-wracking, with two department heads watching, along with a video camera recording the whole thing to send to the piano head back in London.”
This fall, Mr. Liebowitz is the only graduate student studying piano accompaniment at the RCM. “There are 12 new graduate students in the piano studio, and only one of them is British,” he said. “That's just an idea of how diverse the student population is. In the piano studio alone, there are two Americans, one British, a few Russians, one Portuguese [and] one Greek. There are so many accents being thrown around, I can't always guess where people are from any more. Everyone at the RCM is so ridiculously talented. It would be intimidating if people weren't so friendly!”
It’s no surprise that Mr. Liebowitz is meeting a variety of interesting and talented personalities. “Within my first week, I met a vocalist who performed the Queen of the Night on radio broadcasts, a violist who performed in a quartet on cruises across the Mediterranean over the summer, and a pianist who has placed in international competitions,” he said. “As an accompanist, I get to work with them all. It's so surreal, and I haven't even really fully started my coursework yet.”
Mr. Liebowitz said that for the next two years he will be studying with John Blakely, “who is just a legend in the accompaniment field. With my studies here, I'll hopefully be on my way to coaching vocalists at a university setting one day. In order to do that though, I need to brush up on my French, which I studied at Syracuse, and in Strasbourg, France where I studied for a semester and I also need to learn Italian and German.”
It isn’t all school and study for Mr. Liebowitz. “I'm also working at Lo-Max Records, an indie record label in Maida Vale, London,” he said. “Since my major at Syracuse was Music Industry, I decided I need to keep up with the business. Hopefully, I'll always have a position in arts administration while I perform and teach. I've had experience after my internships in Jazz at Lincoln Center's marketing department and Orange Night Live (a school-run organization at Syracuse U), but those were both organizations with live performances. It's really great to do something new. I'm working part-time in a PR role. My latest project was to send out press releases and singles to local media all over the UK and Ireland to promote a tour one of our artists is doing this fall. I've even got to talk to a few famous rock musicians over the past few weeks. You can't get better than that!”
When he has some free time, Mr. Liebowitz plans to go exploring. “I haven't done much tourism yet,” he said. “While my dad was here, we did a bus tour of Windsor, Stonehenge and Bath. I'm really antsy to start up some travels since it's so cheap here. I need to visit Venice at some point. It's a necessity. I'm also hoping to visit Strasbourg, where I studied in 2006 for a semester, to see their Christmas market in December.”
All graphics, photographs, and text appearing on the Huntington Public Schools home page and subsequent official web pages are protected by copyright. Redistribution or commercial use is prohibited without express written permission. Comments or Questions? email the Public Information Office