Marion Feldman is recognized as a leading performer and pedagogue of cello and chamber music. She has been on the cello and chamber music faculty of the Manhattan School of Music since 1974 and the Pre-College Division since 1982. Her longest affiliation has been with the CUNY Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, where she has taught since 1972. She also holds faculty positions at the NYU Steinhardt School of Music and Performing Arts Professions and the City University Graduate Center.
Feldman received her training as a scholarship student at the Juilliard School of Music, where she studied with her Luigi Silva. She completed additional studies with Leonard Rose, Bernard Greenhouse, and Zara Nelsova, and studied chamber music with William Primrose, Artur Balsam, Louis Persinger, and Hans Letz. Feldman received both her bachelor's degree (1960) and master's degree (1962) from the Juilliard School.
Her additional training includes summer masterclasses with Andre Navarra at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy, and coaching with Marion Davies, a student of Emanuel Feuermann, where she was able to gain musical and technical insight into his highly regarded approach to music-making and cello playing.
Feldman has appeared extensively throughout the United States and the Far East as an orchestral soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. Her engagements include numerous recitals at Carnegie Weill Recital Hall, Alice Tully Hall (Lincoln Center) and Merkin Hall in New York City. In Taiwan, she has participated in government-sponsored tours (1992, 2001), appeared in concert in Taipei (2001), and gave masterclasses sponsored by the Quanta Education Foundation and the Taipei American School, leading to a collaboration concert at the National Concert Hall in Taipei, and masterclasses with members of the Ars Trio Taipei. In 2014-15 she gave a series of masterclasses in Taiwan at the prestigious National Taipei Arts University, Shih-Chien Normal University, National Kaoshiung Normal University and the Taiwan Classical Music Society. In Korea, Feldman has attended the Seoul Music Festival, Cheju-Halla Festival and the Kangneung-Manhattan Festival, and has been invited to give masterclasses as a visiting professor at Soong-Sil University in Seoul. Feldman has also received invitations to give masterclasses and a recital at Shanghai Conservatory and the Central Conservatory in Beijing by the government of Mainland China.
Feldman was a member of the New York Lyric Arts Trio for ten years, touring across the United States. They founded the Downeast Chamber Music Center, a school in Castine, Maine dedicated to teaching chamber music to young musicians and featured a summer chamber music series. She later formed the New Manhattan Trio with renown artists Erick Friedman, violinist, and Joseph Seiger, pianist.
In the United States, her summer activities have included Downeast Chamber Music Center as co-director and cello and chamber music faculty, NYU String Quartet Intensive as co-director, and cello and chamber music faculty at Aria, Summit, and Waterloo Summer Festivals and Manhattan in the Mountains.
In 2015, Feldman was honored as a recipient of the NYU Excellence in Teaching Award. Recent projects have been the compiling and editing of the Cello Legacy Series for Carl Fischer Music. The published works available in this series are: The Casals Legacy, Rostropovich: In Memoriam, The Feuermann Legacy, and The duPre Legacy.
Cello Power, published in 2017, is Feldman's newest series. The current volume available is Cello Power, Book 1: Thumb Position Duets for Two Cellos. Two more books are expected to be published in the series.
