Jesús Maria Sanromá was a Puerto Rican pianist who was associated with conductor Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 20 years from the early 1930s. He performed as soloist on the original recording of Edward MacDowell's 'Second Concerto' with Fiedler and the Boston Pops in 1934 and on the original recording of 'Rhapsody in Blue' by George Gershwin in 1935. He had learned to play the piano as a child and performed in public for the first time in Puerto Rico's Fajardo Municipal Theater at the age of eleven. He went on to study at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and also studied in Paris and Berlin. In 1932 he performed in the debut of Maurice Ravel's 'Concerto in G' and over his career he worked with composers such as Pablo Casals, Carlos Chavez, Leonard Bernstein and Igor Stravinsky.
He returned to Puerto Rico in 1952 to become musical consultant of the Department of Music of the University of Puerto Rico. He helped organise the Music Conservatory of Puerto Rico in 1956 and performed regularly at the Pablo Casals Festivals. He died in 1984 aged 82. Albums released posthumously include 'Ferde Grofé: Grand Canyon Suite & Concerto for Piano and Orchestra/Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue' (1997), 'Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Paderewski: Piano Concertos' (2006) and 'Gershwin in Symphony' (2012) plus two recordings on the Pearl label's Piano Masters series: 'Jesús Maria Sanromá' and 'Jesús Maria Sanromá Vol. 2'.
