Biography
[This biography is designed to be of variable length. Begin at the beginning, and stop at the end of any paragraph. The press comments before the biography can of course be omitted.]
February 2007
‘a famous thinker/philosopher of the keyboard' (Seattle Times 2005)
‘quite possibly the most interesting pianist in the world' (Globe & Mail, Toronto 2001)
‘heavenly sounds – diabolical virtuosity. Don't miss him.' (CD Compact, Spain 2004)
‘past praise .. scrupulous sensitivity.' (Gramophone 2006) .
David Owen Norris's work is unusually varied. 2007 sees more performances of his oratorio Prayerbook , first performed in the English Music Festival last October, and the first performance of his radio-opera Pugwash Walks the Plank. He plays concertos on fortepiano in Toronto and Yale. He accompanies David Wilson-Johnson in premiere broadcasts of Stravinsky songs, and Sir John Tomlinson in Winterreise . His 2007 CD releases include Richard Arnell's Piano Concerto, Joseph Horowitz's Jazz Concerto, English viola music, Roger Quilter's piano music and Walter Scott songs.
Other recordings mark Elgar's 150 th Anniversary: a comprehensive selection of Elgar's songs at Elgar's piano, many recorded for the first time, and Karg-Elert's transcriptions of Elgar's orchestral music. Norris's major article on Elgar's songs, The Seas of Separation , which identifies the colourful engraving that inspired Sea Pictures , appears in the Elgar Society Journal. His Radio 3 Building a Library on Elgar's First Symphony is broadcast in April. With Amanda Pitt and Mark Wilde he performs Elgar songs and piano music throughout the year, from Dartington (where he gives the 10 th Anniversary performance of the Piano Concerto) to the Three Choirs, from the Chelmsford Festival to the BBC in Manchester, and notably including a Birthday Bash at the Royal Academy of Music on June 2 nd , which will include the world premiere of Elgar's last song.
Last autumn Norris opened the annual conference of the American Musicological Society in Los Angeles with a recital of Elgar's piano music. He recorded Winterreise on fortepiano with Philip Langridge, whom he also accompanied in Britten song-cycles in Frankfurt. With Amanda Pitt he initiated a new strand of programming, Songs & Pictures , opening in Nottingham, moving on to the National Gallery in Washington DC and now extending to Newcastle-on-Tyne and Birmingham. He made two radio programmes on Faith and Art. His Discovering Music programmes on Radio 3 included Mendelssohn's D minor Piano Concerto.
Norris is a founder-member of the group THE WORKS, who will perform his new English translation of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire at Dartington in August this year. THE WORKS' new venture, the 7 Locks Festival, takes place for the second time in September. Schools' workshops are an important feature – this year, medieval music and jazz. Last September, 500 children played a Square Piano of 1781, and 200 more were mesmerised by the Viennese violinist Ernst Kovacic. Norris broadcast the modern premiere of the newly-discovered arrangement by Cramer of Mozart's C major Piano Concerto, opening up an entirely new area of Mozart scholarship. His John Donne song-cycle Tomorrow nor Yesterday was premiered by Mark Wilde. The Festival marked the centenary of Jaroslav Jezek, whose jazzy Piano Concerto Norris performed and broadcast in Prague and Luxembourg. The Festival included Norris's sequence of comic operas, 2 Murders & a Marriage , which THE WORKS toured widely in 2006, including the Buxton International Opera Festival, where it sold out weeks in advance, and the Oslo Festival, where it enjoyed a full-page splash review with photos (‘ English Elegance and Joy of Playing – brilliant fun – dazzling – the audience was overjoyed.')
Earlier in 2006 Norris toured The World's First Piano Concertos (a Square Piano repertoire he discovered while an Arts & Humanities Research Council Fellow) with Monica Huggett and Sonnerie , from Gateshead to Barcelona, Bilbao to Shrewsbury, and over to America, where American Record Review wrote: ‘The extroverted and energetic Norris, winner of the first Gilmore Artist Award, is a deservedly popular draw. First-rate … full of witty intelligence and charm.'
David Owen Norris is an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, and an Educational Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Musicians.
He was Organ Scholar of Keble College, and 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.
