Lehigh University Philharmonic Music Director Eugene Albulescu is an award-winning performer and conductor who has steered the Lehigh University Philharmonic since 2007. He holds the Ronald J. Ulrich Endowed Chair in Orchestral Studies. Among his conducting accomplishments are a stint as director of the French Chamber Orchestra while on tour during 2008-2010, several performances and recordings with top orchestras including the Romanian National Philharmonic, New York Chamber Orchestra, as well as the New Zealand Symphony, which released his recent recording of Jenny McLeod’s “Rock Concerto” on the Naxos label. As a pianist, Albulescu is a Steinway Artist who combines a blazing technique with the artistic integrity and originality to express musical emotions at their most personal level. He started his piano studies in Romania at the age of six, at the Enescu Music School in Bucharest. His family moved to New Zealand in 1984 to escape Romania’s Communist regime.
Albulescu completed his musical studies at Indiana University where, at nineteen, he was the youngest person ever to reach the level of assistant instructor. He emerged on the international scene in 1994 when his debut CD was awarded the International Grand Prix Liszt, adding Albulescu’s name to the list of winners which include Brendel, Arrau, Horowitz and Bolet. Since then Albulescu has performed worldwide, including concerts at the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts in Chicago, Bargemusic in New York, the Purely Piano series in Auckland, New Zealand, the Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall in New York, as well as the International Liszt Festival of the American Liszt Society. Having been invited to the White House to perform for the Millennium celebrations, he also performed at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Celebrated critic Harold C. Schonberg hailed Albulescu’s “power and infallible fingers of steel,” declaring that “nothing anywhere has any terrors for him.”