David Owen Norris is a pianist & broadcaster.
His recordings on early pianos include concertos by Mozart, Bach, Abel & Hayes, and the Audio Guide to the Cobbe Collection, with pianos played by JC Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Dibdin, JB Cramer, Chopin, Liszt, Thalberg, Bizet & Elgar. Norris’s own stable of pianos includes a 1781 Ganer Square, an 1828 Broadwood Grand, and an 1887 Pleyel Grand, as well as several more recent instruments. He has just acquired a 1796 Broadwood and an 1827 Stodart Patent Compensating Grand for the Keyboard Collection at the University of Southampton

His recordings on modern piano include concertos by Elgar, Lambert, Phillips, Arnell & Horovitz, the complete piano works of Elgar, Dyson & Quilter, and chamber music by Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, Bax, Elgar, McEwen, Dyson, Sherwood & Bridge.

His many song CDs range from Schubert & Haydn on early pianos to Schoenberg & Britten on modern pianos, collaborating with such singers as Amanda Pitt, Catherine Bott, Mark Wilde, Peter Savidge, Philip Langridge, Ian Partridge, James Gilchrist &, especially, David Wilson-Johnson.

Norris has made hundreds of radio programmes since having his own weekly Radio 3 series in the early 90s. He was a regular presenter for the drive-time slot, In Tune, and he’s currently working on his fifteenth Building a Library. For Radio 4 he presented the Inventing series & But I know what I like, and is currently occupied with the iPod series, where he arranges and performs the music as well as hosting the shows. His recent television work includes an acclaimed analysis of Parry’s Jerusalem; he featured prominently in a ninety-minute special on Elgar’s Lost Piano Concerto; and he fronted another hour-and-a-half’s-worth on the Early Music movement, described by the Daily Telegraph as the most literate and probing music programme for many years.

Norris’s work as a composer has expanded since he decided to make more room for it as he turned fifty. He is currently working on his third radio-opera, The Body in the Ballroom, and a Symphony.

Norris is in great demand as a teacher: he’s Professor of Performance at the University of Southampton, Visiting Professor at the RCM & the RNCM, and Educational Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Musicians. Recently he has returned to lecture for Gresham College, of which he is an Emeritus Professor.

David Owen Norris was Organ Scholar at Keble College, Oxford, leaving with a First in Music and a Composition Scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music, where he won the Dove Prize, and privately in Paris. He was a repetiteur at the Royal Opera House, harpist at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Artistic Director of the Petworth Festival and the Cardiff International Festival, Gresham Professor of Music, and Chairman of the Steans Institute for Singers at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Organists, and an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.