Anthony Newman (musician)

He is a specialist in music of the Baroque period, particularly the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and has collaborated with such noted musicians as Kathleen Battle, Julius Baker, Itzhak Perlman, Eugenia Zukerman, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Leonard Bernstein, Michala Petri, and Wynton Marsalis, for whom he arranged and conducted In Gabriel’s Garden, the most popular classical record of 1996.

[3] At age seventeen Newman went to Paris, France, to study at the École Normale de Musique, where he received a diplôme supérieur.

in 1963 from the Mannes School of Music having studied organ with Edgar Hilliar, piano with Edith Oppens and composition with William Sydemann.

[3] Newman's professional debut, in which he played Bach organ works on the pedal harpsichord, took place at the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York in 1967.

Of this performance The New York Times wrote, "His driving rhythms and formidable technical mastery...and intellectually cool understanding of the structures moved his audience to cheers at the endings.

Newman discusses how alterations to the written music - rhythmic variations such as rubato and notes inégales[11] as well as improvised ornamentation - were common in Bach's time and that fast movements were played faster than has been traditionally accepted.

Scholarly opposition to Newman's approach was led by Frederick Neumann who had long held that notes inégales were limited primarily to French performance practice and that Bach, who traveled relatively little, would not have been exposed to this technique.

[14] Music critics too have been of two minds about Newman's interpretations of Bach, as illustrated in the following excerpts from The New York Times: Over time Newman's fast tempos have become relatively common in the performance of Bach's works[1] and his championing of the use of original instruments foreshadowed the historically informed performance movement in America by at least ten years.