Master Amateur Pianist Richard Bernstein
Cassidy Turley’s Richard Bernstein learned to play piano as a child but hadn’t touched the keys for 20 years until his eldest daughter, Mallory, started down the path toward a career as a classical pianist. (She’s got her third advanced degree, an Artist Diploma from the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music). Now that he's been reintroduced, Richard rises daily at 4:30am and travels from White Plains to the room he leases in the Graybar Building for his two pianos (above—it also includes a few couches that he’s offered up to his Metro North friends in event of snow-delayed trains). He practices from 6am to 8am and then heads to work. If he’d had that discipline when he was younger, he says, he wouldn’t be in commercial real estate.
Richard gave a solo recital for clients several years ago and hopes to do so again soon. Meanwhile, he was honored at an Education Through Music fundraiser in April at Cipriani, where he performed with the event’s host, violin virtuoso Joshua Bell (with Richard, above). He sits on that org’s board as well as those of the Israeli Chamber Project and Westchester’s Hoff-Barthelson conservatory. Nowadays, Richard’s working on a Mozart sonata he first learned when he was young; he’s on a Mozart kick having just returned from a mid-September trip with his wife to that master’s stomping grounds of Prague and Vienna.
