Ferrante & Teicher


Ferrante & Teicher were a duo of American piano players, known for their light arrangements of familiar classical pieces, movie soundtracks, and show tunes, as well as their signature style of florid, intricate and fast-paced piano playing performances.

Career

Arthur Ferrante, and Louis Teicher met while studying at the Juilliard School of Music in New York in 1930. Musical prodigies, they began performing as a piano duo while still in school. After graduating, they joined the Juilliard faculty.
In 1947, they launched a full-time concert career, at first playing nightclubs, then quickly moving up to playing classical music with orchestral backing. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith relates the story that in the 1950s the two students practiced in the home of his grandmother Constance Neidhart Tallarico. Between 1950 and 1980, they were a major American "easy listening" act, and scored four big U.S. hits: "Theme from The Apartment", "Theme From Exodus", "Tonight", and "Midnight Cowboy". They performed and recorded regularly with pops orchestras popular standards by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, the Sherman Brothers and others. In 1973, they did the Hollywood Radio Theater theme for the Rod Serling radio drama series, The Zero Hour.
The duo also experimented with prepared pianos, adding paper, sticks, rubber, wood blocks, metal bars, chains, glass, mallets, and other found objects to piano string beds. In this way they were able to produce a variety of bizarre sounds that sometimes resembled percussion instruments, and at other times resulted in special effects that sounded as if they were electronically synthesized.
Both men were initiated as honorary members of Tau Kappa Epsilon at Central State University while on tour.
Ferrante and Teicher ceased performing in 1989 and retired to Longboat Key and Siesta Key, respectively, close to each other on the west coast of Florida. They continued to play together occasionally at a local piano store.
CDs of their music, some of it not previously released, have continued to appear.
Louis Teicher died of a heart attack in August 2008, three weeks before his 84th birthday. Arthur Ferrante died of natural causes on September 19, 2009, twelve days after his 88th birthday. Arthur is survived by his wife, Jena; his daughter, Brenda Eberhardt; and two granddaughters.
On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Ferrante & Teicher among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

Discography

Singles

Albums

1950s