[1] After graduating from Curtis in 1946, he made his professional solo debut with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
He then furthered his piano studies with Rudolf Serkin at the Marlboro Music Festival and informally with Vladimir Horowitz.
He revived the Tchaikovsky 2nd and 3rd Piano Concertos, recorded by CBS with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and several of his students play these works.
In 1964, he recorded Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic.
[2] Probably Graffman's best known recorded performance was for the soundtrack of the 1979 Woody Allen movie Manhattan in which he played George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic.
This altered technique appeared to aggravate the problem, ultimately forcing him to stop performing with his right hand altogether by around 1979.
In 1985 he gave the UK premiere of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Piano Concerto in C-sharp for the Left Hand.