David Owen NORRIS
Qualifications: MA, FRAM, FRCO
David Owen Norris left Oxford with a First and a Composition Scholarship to study in London and Paris. He was Repetiteur at the Royal Opera House, Harpist at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Artistic Director of Festivals in Cardiff and Petworth, Chairman of the Steans Institute for Singers in Chicago , and the Gresham Professor of Music in London . He is frequently heard as a radio broadcaster; his many series have included The Works, But I know what I like and All the Rage, and he presented the drive-time show In Tune for several years.
First and foremost he is a pianist, beginning as an accompanist to such artists as Dame Janet Baker, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Larry Adler and Ernst Kovacic. In 1991, after a worldwide search, the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival appointed him the first Gilmore Artist, a quadrennial award.
His subsequent international solo career has included concertos with the Chicago and Detroit Symphony Orchestras and the Handel & Haydn Society in Boston (amongst many other North American orchestras) the Philharmonia, the Academy of Ancient Music, and several of the BBC's orchestras, including three appearances at the Proms: and solo recitals all over North America and Australia, and in every European country from Hungary westward. He is a Professor at the Royal College of Music, and Head of Keyboard at the University of Southampton.
He frequently performs on early pianos: in January this year at the RNCM Schumann & Brahms Festival in Manchester, he and Amanda Pitt used the piano made for Clara Schumann by her uncle and her father to perform songs which were actually composed at it, including Robert Schumann's Frauenliebe-und Leben. Norris's Keyboard Collection at Southampton includes a 1781 Ganer Square Piano, an 1817 Broadwood, and an 1887 Pleyel.
His recent CDs include premiere recordings of the complete solo piano music of Elgar, Dyson and Quilter, The World's First Piano Concertos on Square Piano with Monica Huggett and Sonnerie, and London Pride with Catherine Bott. He released the premiere recording of Elgar's Piano Concerto on the Dutton label in February. He accompanies Amanda Pitt, Joanne Thomas, David Wilson-Johnson and Philip Langridge in Roger Quilter's complete folksong arrangements and vocal duets, which came out in April on Naxos, one of the first-fruits of the new organisation THE WORKS, which sprang from performances in January this year of the Mozartian operatic sequence Two Murders and a Marriage. The operas have been invited to the Edinburgh Fringe this August.
In May Norris recorded a DVD with the American fortepianist Malcolm Bilson, and gave performances of the Lambert Concerto in Seattle and the Elgar Concerto in Vancouver. An hour-long programme in which he analysed the ‘new' Elgar Concerto was broadcast on BBC Radio3. A BBC2 Television documentary telling the story of how the Concerto came to be completed will be made in September.
www.davidowennorris.com