Serkin was born on July 24, 1947, in Manhattan.[1] He was the son of Irene Busch Serkin and pianist Rudolf Serkin, grandson of the influential violinist Adolf Busch,[1] and great-nephew of conductor Fritz Busch. Peter was given the middle name Adolf in honor of his grandfather.[1][2] He spent much of his childhood on his parents' farm in Guilford, Vermont.[1]
Serkin's concert career began in 1958,[6] when he first performed at the Marlboro Music Festival, a seminal agent and incubator of chamber music performance in the U.S., established in 1951 by his father Rudolf Serkin, Hermann and Adolf Busch, and Marcel, Blanche and Louis Moyse. Following that performance, Peter Serkin was invited to play with major orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell and the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy.[7] In 1966, at age 19, Serkin was awarded the Grammy Award for Most Promising New Classical Recording Artist.[3] Three of his recordings garnered Grammy nominations (one of them features six Mozart concertos; the two others feature the music of Olivier Messiaen) and his recordings won other awards. Serkin was the first pianist to receive the Premio Internazionale Musicale Chigiana award in 1983[8] and he received an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory of Music in 2001.[9]
In 1968, shortly after marrying and becoming a father, Serkin decided to stop playing music altogether.[1] In the winter of 1971, he, his wife, and baby daughter Karina moved to a small rural town in Mexico. About eight months later, on a Sunday morning, Serkin heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach being broadcast over the radio from a neighbor's house. As he listened, he said, "It became clear to me that I should play." He returned to the U.S. and began his musical career anew.[10]
Serkin was a committed performer of new and recent music. He played works as world premieres or that were dedicated to him, by composers such as Elliott Carter, Alexander Goehr, Knussen, Lieberson and Takemitsu.[7] The American composer Ned Rorem writes of Serkin, "His uniqueness lies, as I hear it, in a friendly rather than over-awed approach to the classics, which nonetheless plays with the care and brio that is in the family blood, and he's not afraid to be ugly. He approaches contemporary music with the same depth as he does the classics, and he is unique among the superstars in that he approaches it at all."[13]
Among prominent virtuosi, Peter Serkin was one of the first to experiment with period fortepianos, and the first to record late Beethoven sonatas on pianos of both the modern as well as Beethoven's era.[3]
Serkin was married to Wendy Spinner until their divorce in 1979; they had one daughter. He was then married to Regina Touhey, and had four children with her; they divorced in 2018. Serkin died from pancreatic cancer at his home in Red Hook, New York, on February 1, 2020.[1][3]