Pianist
Itamar Golan is one of Israel's foremost chamber music players and accompanists. He is also active as a soloist and is a prominent educator.
Golan was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the Soviet Union, on August 3, 1970. His family moved to Israel when he was one, and he studied piano there with Lara Vodovoz and Emmanuel Krasovsky. At seven, he gave his first recital, and he attracted enough attention to win a scholarship from the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation for study in the U.S. in 1985. For the next four years, he studied at the New England Conservatory, working with Patricia Zander and
Leonard Shure. He also took chamber music courses with Chaim Taub, and chamber music would become a major focus of his career.
Golan has performed widely as an accompanist and chamber musician in both Israel and the U.S., with both instrumental and vocal collaborators. The latter group includes soprano
Barbara Hendricks.
Golan has accompanied top-flight violinists
Janine Jansen,
Maxim Vengerov, and
Shlomo Mintz, among others; he has also performed with cellist
Matt Haimovitz. As a soloist, he has appeared with the
Israel Philharmonic and the
Berlin Philharmonic, and he has performed at the Salzburg, Tanglewood, and Verbier Festivals, among many others. In 1991,
Golan took a faculty position at the Manhattan School of Music, moving after that to the Paris Conservatory, where he remains the professor of chamber music.
Thanks to his international circle of collaborators,
Golan has amassed a substantial recording catalog that began with
Virtuoso Vengerov in 1993. He backed violinist
Kyung-Wha Chung on her
Souvenirs album in 1999, and
Jansen on her high-profile recital
Beau Soir in 2011.
Golan joined cellist
Erica Piccotti on a recital of
works by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Franck on the Warner Classics label in 2018. His chamber music recording credits include
Haimovitz's album containing the
Schubert Arpeggione Sonata, D. 821, in 2016.