David Owen Norris
In 2009, David Owen Norris plays English piano music in Norwich, Leeds, Edinburgh, London, and the English Music Festival, and gives recitals in Chicago, Amsterdam and Berlin. His main undertaking in this Mendelssohn Bicentenary year is a series of recordings and performances of songs and piano music that embody new insights into that composer’s style. He has recorded the complete Songs without Words at the piano belonging to Gustav Holst – the CD is launched during the Cheltenham Festival. A further selection of piano pieces and many songs, including a newly discovered song-cycle with words by Mendelssohn himself, has been recorded with Amanda Pitt and Mark Wilde, with performances in the Guildford International Festival, London, Birmingham and Southampton.
Norris’s CDs of Elgar’s Falstaff in Karg-Elert’s piano transcription, of the Pomp & Circumstance Marches in his own transcriptions, of Quilter’s complete Piano Music, and of Muriel Herbert songs with James Gilchrist, are released in the Spring. In the summer Norris’s work includes a series of recordings and concerts to celebrate the Bicentenary of the poet Tennyson; a recital of Lieder in English to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of A.H. Fox Strangways, a noted translator of Schubert; and concerts, recordings and a programme for BBC Radio 4 exploring the music collection of Jane Austen and her family. In April, Norris is Building a Library for Radio 3, on Brahms’s Six Piano Pieces Op.118, and in June he contributes to the BBC’s Haydn celebrations.
Norris’s song-cycle of poems from the Great War for tenor, cello and piano, Think only this, has its fourth and fifth performances this year, in Hexham and Epsom, its roster of performers now comprising Philip Langridge, Ian Partridge, Ferrier winner Ben Johnson and Mark Wilde. Further performances of his oratorio Prayerbook, and of his Piano Concerto, are planned for 2010.
His 2009 projects with the musicians’ collective THE WORKS (‘a treasure trove’ BBC Radio 3;‘a treasure house’ Sunday Times) include his Haydn adaptation A New Creation, where six hundred children sing, play and dance in Winchester Cathedral, with Timothy West as the Book of Genesis; and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the newly reconstructed Dresden version in Poole. THE WORKS have given further performances of their widely travelled operatic sequence 2 Murders & a Marriage and of Norris’s new radio-opera Pugwash walks the plank. On Elgar’s birthday they bring back their acclaimed programme A Hawk dreaming poetry, telling the story of Elgar’s complicated emotional life through songs, poems and pictures, performing it both in Birmingham Town Hall and in the Elgar Birthplace Museum.
Norris is Professor of Musical Performance at the University of Southampton and Visiting Professor of Fortepiano at the Royal College of Music, an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, Educational Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Musicians, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Organists. He was Organ Scholar at Keble, 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 the City of London. His many radio series have included The Works, But I know what I like and All the Rage, and he presented the drivetime 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 and Larry Adler. 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 four appearances at the Proms: and solo recitals all over North America and Australia, and in every European country from Hungary westward.
Photograph courtesy of Simon Weir
