Pianist

Charles Rosen, 85, the renowned pianist and prolific writer whose award-winning book The Classical Style has been read by music students around the world, died Sunday at a New York hospital after a battle with cancer. In his long career, Mr. Rosen combined a concert pianist's virtuosity with a well-rounded cultural erudition that made him a sometimes feared presence in New York's intellectual circles. His strong affinity for contemporary music brought him into close collaboration with a number of notable 20th-century composers, especially Elliott Carter, who died in November.

Though deeply loved as the city's chief musical importer, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society strikes a thoughtful balance between local and foreign. Friday night's partnership between Curtis Institute of Music student Sarah Shafer and venerable pianist Richard Goode was a particularly successful incident of this kind of blending. One might also conclude that reaching across the generations was efficacious. The program of mostly Schubert and Brahms nestled piano repertoire alongside songs (they also joined in a Mahler song)

NEW YORK - The sitting room is meticulously appointed, with the last two issues of the New York Review of Books neatly folded on the end table. In the kitchen, not a stray crumb is to be seen. But Seymour Lipkin's piano room looks like the aftermath of an earthquake. Fallen stacks of scores, no doubt containing a large slice of western classical music, are still almost as tall as the diminutive pianst. At the top of a pile sits Bach's mighty Well Tempered Clavier Book II , on which he's working in his 85th year.

Ghosts of performers past stand guard over standard repertoire, and it takes a ruthless individualist to wave then off. But Nareh Arghamanyan never seemed to consciously repudiate her predecessors in an extraordinarily charismatic Philadelphia Chamber Music Society appearance Wednesday night at the American Philosophical Society. Rather, it was as if the 23-year-old Armenian-born pianist had never encountered them at all, and was interested only in her own personal communions with Bach, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff.

It was evident from the outset of Friday's performance that Ramsey Lewis was in a playful mood. He opened with "Wade in the Water," an appropriate number for a sold-out audience that had just walked in from a gray, rainy day. But it was a tease: Lewis suddenly interpolated Irving Berlin's "Heat Wave" into what had been a hushed, lyrical solo. The 77-year-old piano great maintained that jocular mood throughout his 90-minute set at Montgomery County Community College's Science Center Theater, though often at the expense of his much younger sidemen.

Anthony Patrick Coppa, 85, of Merion, a mechanical engineer who also played piano and counseled troubled children at the Youth Study Center, died of natural causes Monday, Oct. 8, at his home. Mr. Coppa spent more than 40 years as an engineer, specializing in structures. He worked for Westinghouse and General Electric in Valley Forge. He was born in Philadelphia on March 22, 1927, the son of Nicola and Felicia Coppa, immigrants from Italy. Mr. Coppa, who grew up in South Philadelphia, attended public schools, graduating from Central High School.

Was the thunder coming from inside the Gordon Theater on the Rutgers Camden campus or outside amid Saturday night's torrential rain? Both places. Pianist Di Wu, whom Philadelphia audiences know well from her years at the Curtis Institute and Astral Artists, played Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with Symphony in C in a performance with a shameless taste for musical gestures of tidal wave proportions. Music director Rossen Milanov seemed to challenge her with big-boned phrasing that asked, "Can you top this?"

Charlotte Schreiber Prichard, 90, a music teacher and pianist in Delaware County, died of complications from dementia Sunday, July 22, at Freedom Village, a retirement community in West Brandywine, Chester County. She lived in Havertown from 1946 before moving to West Brandywine in 1999. Born in Philadelphia, Mrs. Prichard graduated from Haverford High School in 1939 and earned a master of music degree at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music in 1946, where she studied with Olga Samaroff Stokowski, former wife of conductor Leopold Stokowski.

The internationally renowned Romanian pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa, 33, has been found dead in her apartment in Vienna. The musician's agent, Andreea Butucariu, said in a statement Friday that Ms. Ursuleasa died Thursday from the effects of a cerebral hemorrhage and asked for her family's privacy to be respected. Police in Vienna confirmed the cause of death. Butucariu told Romanian media that Ms. Ursuleasa had recently canceled two concerts in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, on unspecified health grounds.

The train ride to the Majdanek concentration camp killed several of the Jews who had survived the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising. To avoid dying of thirst in a packed boxcar, the 25-year-old Marian Filar licked his own sweat. And on the day he arrived at Majdanek, he had no shame in lapping, like an animal, from a puddle on the ground. Still, how did he survive? "I wonder myself," Mr. Filar told Inquirer music critic David Patrick Stearns in a 2003 interview. On Tuesday, July 10, Marian Filar, 94, a concert pianist who from the 1950s to the 1980s was a music teacher, first at Settlement Music School and then at Temple University, died at his home in Wyncote.