Biography
[For the convenience of promoters, this biography is of variable length. Begin at the beginning and stop at the end of any paragraph. The press quotes at the beginning may be omitted.]
March 2010 – please do not use earlier versions
‘Swaggering conviction, glinting mischief … Once again, Norris’s pianism is past praise in its scrupulous poise, immaculate touch and attention to dynamic nuance. What’s more, he also displays an acute intellectual and emotional understanding … artistry of a very high order.’
Gramophone October 2009 on Elgar at the Piano Vol.2
‘Norris gives the performance of his life, handling the bravura with aplomb and total conviction. He also has a marvellous repose at the keyboard. Less, he knows, is more.’
Gramophone August 2008, on Montague Phillips Piano Concertos
‘a famous thinker/philosopher of the keyboard’
Seattle Times
‘visionary musical leadership’
Classic FM Magazine
‘quite possibly the most interesting pianist in the world’
Globe & Mail, Toronto
In the last twelve months or so, David Owen Norris has played English music across the UK, in Amsterdam, Dresden, Berlin, Taipei, San Diego, Chicago, and in the Gilmore Festival in Michigan, celebrating the 20th anniversary of his appointment as the first Gilmore Artist. His projects with the musicians’ collective THE WORKS (‘a treasure trove’ BBC Radio 3;‘a treasure house’ Sunday Times) included his Haydn adaptation A New Creation, where six hundred children sang, played and danced in Winchester Cathedral, with Timothy West as the Book of Genesis; Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the newly reconstructed Dresden version in Poole; and further performances of the widely travelled operatic sequence 2 Murders & a Marriage incorporating Norris’s new radio-opera Pugwash walks the plank, which was also featured at the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House. He is currently working on another radio-opera, The Body in the Ballroom.
Concerts later this year include Amanda Holden’s new translation of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, for the Southern Cathedrals Festival with Mark Wilde; Schumann chamber music at King’s Place; Brahms’s Magelonelieder in Rotterdam with David Wilson-Johnson; and a week of Mozart in Oslo.
Norris’s recent radio work has included Building a Library on Brahms’s Six Piano Pieces Op.118, and on Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque; programmes on Haydn and on composers who died in 1934 (Elgar, Delius and Holst); and the theme tune and incidental music for Radio 4’s six-week series A History of Home. His programme Jane Austen’s iPod, broadcast at the beginning of the year, was so well received that he is currently working on a whole iPod series culminating in Dickens’s iPod on Christmas Day.
Norris’s recordings released this year include Britten’s songs to Scottish texts with Mark Wilde – the first time they have been recorded by a Scot; Beethoven viola music with Paul Silverthorne, recorded on an 1865 Blumel piano; songs and piano pieces from newly discovered volumes of the Austen family music collection, with Amanda Pitt and John Lofthouse, recorded on JB Cramer’s 1817 Broadwood; Mendelssohn songs with Amanda Pitt and Mark Wilde, recorded on Sigismund Thalberg’s 1845 Erard; and the complete Songs without Words, incorporating important new discoveries about Mendelssohn’s musical syntax, recorded on Gustav Holst’s 1850 Collard & Collard bi-chord grand.
Norris is in great demand to speak and play at academic conferences: this year, on Words and Music at Royal Holloway, on Travelling Virtuosos at Bristol, on the Piano Trio at Middlesex, and at Oxford on Early Science and Music for the Royal Society. He’ll also appear in the Cheltenham Science Festival and the Harrogate Crimewriting Festival, and he gives the keynote lecture at the Scottish International Piano Competition.
Norris is an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, Professor of Musical Performance at the University of Southampton, Visiting Professor of Fortepiano at the Royal College of Music, Educational Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Musicians, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and of the Royal College of Organists. He is the Director of Music at Poole Parish Church. He was Organ Scholar at Keble, and left Oxford with a First and a Composition Scholarship to study in London and Paris. He was a Repetiteur at the Royal Opera House, and Harpist at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has been Artistic Director of the Cardiff International Festival and the Petworth Festival, Chairman of the Steans Institute for Singers at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, and the Gresham Professor of Music in the City of London.
