Conducting, he said, released him from some of the stage fright that had shadowed him since childhood, but he returned time and again to the piano, with what reviewers described as tenderness matched with vigorous intelligence.
In 2008, Ivan Hewett of The Daily Telegraph described him as a “pianist in the same mold of András Schiff and Murray Perahia: a resolute defender of the musical high ground, and someone who keeps returning to the great works and finding something new in them.”
Stephen Nicholas Kovacevich was born in Los Angeles on Oct. 17, 1940, to Nicholas Kovacevich, a Yugoslav-born aircraft design engineer, and Loretta (Zuban) Kovacevich. Within a few years, his parents divorced, and his mother remarried, to Murry Bishop, a Bay Area dentist. Stephen said he was not formally adopted, but that his mother insisted on his taking the last name Bishop.
In interviews, he declined to speak about his upbringing beyond describing it as “lousy.” Nevertheless, his talents as a pianist were recognized early. After being able to identify notes at 3, he was sent to Whittier College for evaluation by the music department, whose dean reportedly declared him a prodigy.
He took lessons with Lev Shorr, a Russian émigré who also taught Leon Fleisher and Samuel Lipman. At 11, Stephen was a Young People’s Concert soloist with the San Francisco Symphony and gave his first recital, playing an ambitious program that included Handel, Mozart, Alexander Tcherepnin and Dmitri Kabalevsky.
At 14, sporting a crew cut and dressed in a white dinner jacket, according to a review in The San Francisco Call-Bulletin, he played “with consummate authority” Ravel’s Concerto in G with the San Francisco Symphony and the guest conductor Arthur Fiedler.
