Celebrating Women's History: Judit Jaimes (Piano '60)

“Judit Jaimes is the new Teresa Carreño, due to her perfect technique and interpretation, to a degree that only a few master achieve.” —Witold Małcużyński, legendary Polish pianist

Born in San Antonio del Táchira, Venezuela, on January 22, 1939, renowned pianist, educator, and Curtis alumna Carmen Judit de Betula Jaimes Hernández, known professionally as Judit Jaimes (Piano ’60), began her musical studies at age four, studying piano under the guidance of maestro Miguel Ángel Espinel.

At age six, Ms. Jaimes gave her first public performance at the Municipal Theater of Caracas. Witnessing her extraordinary talent, government officials offered for Venezuela to finance the child’s musical education, and the rest was history. A few years later, she was awarded a scholarship to study in New York as a student of Olga Stroumillo and Isabella Vengerova. She was then invited to attend Curtis in 1951. Over the next nine years, she studied here in Philadelphia with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski and performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concert in 1953. 

Throughout the next few decades, Ms. Jaimes’s rising career found her recording and performing with many of the most prestigious American and European orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, and many others. Praised in the New York Times for her April 22, 1978, solo recital performance at Alice Tully Hall as “a Venezuelan pianist of impeccable taste and the kind of keyboard facility that meets the demands of difficult music without ever calling attention to itself,” she continued to receive acclaim and garner international attention for her talents.  

As a soloist, Ms. Jaimes inaugurated the Aula Magna auditorium—a 2020 World Heritage Site of Humanity as declared by UNESCO—with the Venezuelan Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Pedro Antonio Ríos Reyna on March 12, 1954. She went on to present numerous concerts and recitals across the globe, frequently performing works by Latin American and Venezuelan composers, including Rhazés Hernández López, Juan Vicente Lecuna, Moisés Moleiro, and Antonio Estévez. A firm believer in providing opportunities for the next generation of classical musicians, she was also one of the leading proponents of the Sistema Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela) led by maestro José Antonio Abreu.

After receiving Venezuela’s National Music Prize in 1988 and having the city of San Cristóbal name its school of the arts in her honor, Ms. Jaimes moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She served as the head of the piano department at the Peck School of Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1988 until her retirement in 2011.

Please visit the Curtis Institute of Music Open Archives and Recitals (CIMOAR). Learn more about Curtis’s library and archives HERE.

Photo Credits: 1. & 2.) Portraits of Ms. Jaimes, courtesy of Elena Abend’s official YouTube page. 2.) 1953 press photo of Judit Jaimes (known as the “Bobbysox Pianist” for wearing white bobbysox at performances) at age 13 in New York; United Press Photo, 2/12/53. 3.) The 1978 cover of Judit Jaimes’s LP recording of Schumann, Grieg Piano Concerti with the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton maestro Eduardo Mata; Enigma Record Label. 4.) Ms. Jaimes’s graduation photo at Curtis; courtesy of the Curtis Archives. 5.)  Judit Jaimes and her former student, pianist Ian Tomaz, December 2018; Cecilia Brown; Wikimedia.