Philippe Entremont was born in Reims on 7 June 1934 to musical parents — his mother a Grand Prix pianist, his father an opera conductor — and had his first lessons from his mother at six. He studied in Paris with Marguerite Long and at the Conservatoire, taking prizes in sight-reading at twelve, chamber music at fourteen and piano at fifteen, and becoming a laureate of the Long-Thibaud Competition at sixteen. He won a prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1952 and began giving concerts seriously from then.

Tours of South America and the United States for the National Music League and Jeunesses Musicales in 1953 and 1955 were followed by an audition for Eugene Ormandy in 1954 and a Philadelphia Orchestra debut in November 1956; his Columbia records with Ormandy and with Leonard Bernstein — Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody and Second Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s First, the Saint-Saëns concertos — carried French pianism to a large American audience. In 1968 he recorded Mozart’s Concertos K. 415 and K. 453 directing the Collegium Musicum de Paris from the keyboard, and from then on divided his work between the two roles, becoming music director of the New Orleans Symphony from 1980 to 1986 and principal conductor of the Denver Symphony.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Entremont
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1380659