Pianist and harpsichordist Rosalyn Tureck, who played an important role in the revival of interest in the music of J. S. Bach, died on July 17 in Riverdale, N.Y. at the age of 88.

Rosalyn Tureck (Photo copyright Toppo-New York)

Born in Chicago in 1914, Tureck moved to New York at 16 to study at Juilliard with Olga Samaroff and graduated in 1935 with distinction. She was a member of Juilliard's piano faculty from 1945 to 1955, and later returned to the School for a number of master classes over the years (including several on Bach transcription for guitar).

Tureck became interested in the piano at age 4, discovering she had perfect pitch and could imitate what she heard her older sister play. Her early teachers were the Russian Sophia Brilliant-Liven (who had been a teaching assistant to Anton Rubinstein) and Jan Chiapusso, a Dutch-Italian pianist born in Java who introduced Tureck to the sounds of Indonesian, Asian, and African instruments long before "world music" was popular. By the time she arrived at Juilliard, Tureck already intended to focus on the music of Bach. A series of six all-Bach concerts that she presented at Town Hall in 1937, two years after her graduation, was daring in the days that the composer's music was widely considered to be didactic exercises rather than concert fare. (Her first public performance, however, had actually been on the theremin.)

In the late 1950s she ceased her other activities—which had included premiering works written for her and championing new music through Composers of Today, an organization she founded—to move to London, where she formed the Tureck Bach Players and the International Bach Society, a forum for musicologists and performers. (Her later Tureck Bach Institute, founded in 1981, had a similar mission.) She returned to New York in 1977 for a time before heading back to England in the 1980s. At the time of her death, she had only lived in New York since 2001.

In addition to her well-known recordings for VAI and Deutsche Grammophon, Tureck published numerous articles on Bach and a three-volume collection of performance studies. But her scholarly dedication to the composer never interfered with the compelling nature of her approach to his works, which Allan Kozinn of the New York Times characterized as "entirely nondogmatic and even fairly freewheeling." She is survived by a sister and two nephews.