“For someone so young, it was a big deal,” he said over the phone, adding that he readily accepted being on the radio. “The thing he let me do that I flipped for was he let me read some of the commercials on the show. Whenever I came over, he would say to me, ‘And now, Emmanuel X is going to read the following ad.’
Mr X was among the artists celebrating at a concert Mr. Sherman had his 90th birthday last year, hosted by Mr. Sherman himself, also featured violinists Chi-eun Kim, Joshua Bell and Annie Kavafian, and the Emerson String Quartet. Ms. Kim, who also spoke, discussed her first appearance on the “Young Artist Showcase” when she was a teenager.
He said, “I’ve never spoken on a radio station, not even in Korea.” “And I said to you, ‘I’m so nervous, but it’s a live show — what if I make a mistake?’ And you told me, do you remember what you told me, you said: ‘Like you’re talking to me and people are listening to you, just talk to the microphone. That’s it. It’s just us Both are there. And I was like, okay.
Robert Sherman was born on July 23, 1932 in Manhattan. His parents were immigrants: his father, Isaac, who ran an import-export business and other companies, was from Ukraine. His mother, Ms. Reisenberg, was Lithuanian.
He taught Robert to play the piano – with limited success.
“I had a certain talent for it and lacked the discipline to do anything else,” Mr. Sherman said in an interview in 2019 for the Avery Fisher Artist Program oral history project. “Mom always told me, ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone that you studied with me, because you’re not typical of my class.'”
He joked that he decided to enroll in the academically rigorous Stuyvesant High School, where he felt he would be the best pianist, rather than a performing arts school where he thought he would be the worst.
