Welcome to the official Musical Artist Portfolio of concert pianist, teacher, lecturer, scholar, and composer Thaddeus Kozuch.  Completely American-trained, the young Thaddeus quickly became known as a musical prodigy, performing many challenging works at a maturity level far beyond his age.  Over his 70+ years career, Kozuch's performances have been heralded by commentators and enthusiastic music lovers of all ages.  Upon hearing the young lad perform Chopin, Artur Rubinstein commented that Thaddeus possessed "a rare talent and maturity".  Vladimir Horowitz also noted that Kozuch had "fabulous fingers, great dexterity".

More information about Thaddeus Kozuch may be found on the BIO pages.

Recording technology

The recordings on this website were made from Thaddeus Kozuch's concert recitals and his Chicago home studio. 

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Early DePaul University tapes --- Thaddeus Kozuch was a Professor and head of the DePaul University Music School's piano department, where he taught and performed often for nearly 30 years.  Unfortunately, the DePaul faculty recitals were not recorded regularly, and those few recital recording tapes that were given to Mr. Kozuch are extremely distorted with very poor audio quality.  All remaining DePaul recordings were (sadly) discarded when the university music school moved to its new Chicago campus. 

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Later DePaul University recordings --- In light of the above situation, Kozuch's son Jon began making concert and studio recordings in the later years.  Before 1970 recordings were done on an Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder.  The recordings starting in 1970 were done with a Revox studio quality tape recorder using a Dolby-B noise reduction unit and two Sony condenser microphones.  In the 1980's a Sony DAT tape recorder replaced the Revox/Dolby combination still using the same condenser microphones.  In the 1980's a VHS video camera was used, and later a VCR with Hi-Fi sound.  In the mid-to-late 1990's, with the advent of digital audio and video data streaming formats and their storage on computers, all recordings were digitized and placed on a network server using lossless audio methods. 

Lucky discovery --- Works recently discovered from a 60-year old 1963 reel-to-reel tape made by a friend of the family have been edited to correct audio pitch dropouts, and to properly match the piano's tuning.  The ThaddeusKozuch.com website now contains the first of these, Kozuch's only recordings of several Chopin Etudes. The sound quality is acceptable, given the poor quality of the original media.  

78 rpm discs --- The website also has a good number of 1947 disc transfers of works that best illustrate Kozuch's early performances (Hint: check out the incredible Prokofiev 6th sonata recording).