I should play." He returned to the U.S. and began his musical career anew. Henceforth, Serkin performed around the world with leading orchestras and conductors including Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Pierre Boulez, Seiji Ozawa, Simon Rattle, James Levine, and Christoph Eschenbach. He made numerous recordings, primarily for RCA Victor. He recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations five times, the first made when he was 18, the fourth when he was 47, the fifth when he was 70. He recorded music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, and Dvořák as well as more recent composers such as Reger, Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, Hans Werner Henze, Takemitsu, Oliver Knussen, Peter Lieberson and Stefan Wolpe. A recording of Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus at age 25 became iconic, with noted "deep understanding of the composer’s sound-world and its emotional extremes, coupled with considerable instrumental prowess". In 2009, he recorded chamber music by Charles Wuorinen with the Brentano String Quartet. Serkin was a committed performer of new and recent music. He played works as world premieres or that were dedicated to him, by composers such as Elliott Carter, Alexander Goehr, Knussen, Lieberson and Takemitsu. The American composer Ned Rorem writes of Serkin, "His uniqueness lies, as I hear it, in a friendly rather than over-awed approach to the classics, which nonetheless plays with the care and brio that is in the family blood, and he's not afraid to be ugly. He approaches contemporary music with the same depth as he does the classics, and he is unique among the superstars in that he approaches it at all." Among prominent virtuosi, Peter Serkin was one of the first to experiment with period fortepianos, and the first to record late Beethoven sonatas on pianos of both the modern as well as Beethoven's era. Serkin collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, András Schiff, Alexander Schneider, Pamela Frank, Harold Wright, the Guarneri Quartet, the Budapest Quartet, and other prominent musicians and ensembles, such as principal wind players of major American orchestras. In addition, he was one of the founding members of TASHI. He taught at the Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music and the Yale School of Music and was on faculty at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. Among those who studied piano with him is Simone Dinnerstein. Personal life and death Serkin was married to Wendy Spinner until their divorce in 1979; they had one