“For someone so young, it was a big deal,” he said on the phone, adding that he found it easy to be on the radio. “What he made me do, that I freaked out about, is he let me read some of the ads on the show. Every time I came, he made me say, ‘And now Emanuel Ax is going to read the next ad.’”
Ax was one of the performers at a concert to celebrate Mr. Sherman’s 90th birthday last year, which Mr. Sherman himself organized, along with violinists Chee-Yun Kim, Joshua Bell and Ani Kavafian and the Emerson String Quartet. Mrs. Kim, who also spoke, discussed her first performance on “Young Artists Showcase”, when she was a teenager.
“I’ve never spoken on a radio station, not even in Korea,” she said. “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, remember what you told me, you said, “Just talk into the microphone while you’re talking to me and people happen to be listening in. That’s all. It’s just the two of us.” 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 and export business, among other things, came from Ukraine. His mother, Mrs. Reisenberg, was Lithuanian.
She taught Robert to play the piano – with limited success.
“I had a certain knack for it and lacked the discipline to do anything,” Mr. Sherman said in a 2019 interview for the Avery Fisher Artist Program oral history project. “Mother used to say to me, ‘For God’s sake don’t tell anyone you study with me, because you’re not typical of my class.'”
He joked that he chose to attend the academically strict Stuyvesant High School, where he believed he would be the best pianist, rather than a performing arts school, where he assumed he would be the worst.