David Owen Norris

This season David Owen Norris has played in Oslo, Amsterdam, Wroclaw and Washington, DC. Concerts in Britain have included Winterreise with Thomas Guthrie in Edinburgh and Oxford, Mozart’s C major Concerto in Poole, and Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. His January recording of Piano Concertos by Montague Phillips and Victor Hely-Hutchinson was released in March. Song cycles by Trevor Hold (with David Wilson-Johnson and Amanda Pitt) follow in May. Norris’s recordings of Karg-Elert’s fiendish piano transcription of Elgar’s Falstaff and his own transcriptions of the Pomp & Circumstance Marches will appear later this year. At the end of April Norris conducted the second performance of his oratorio Prayerbook, which first appeared in the English Music Festival in 2006. His Piano Concerto is to be premiered in the second English Music Festival in May. His second radio-opera, Pugwash walks the plank, will be premiered in the autumn.

In February Norris presided over a Vaughan Williams tribute with a difference: a complete performance of the English Hymnal at Southampton, where he also launched a wide-ranging project on Mendelssohn’s pianos. Other work on early pianos has included concerts with Monica Huggett and the Audio Guide to the remarkable Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands. For BBC Radio 3’s Chopin weekend he filmed lessons on the A major Prelude and the B flat Mazurka which are posted on the BBC website – a new innovation for the BBC.

In the summer of 2007 Norris was appointed Professor of Musical Performance at the University of Southampton, and Visiting Professor of Fortepiano at the Royal College of Music. He is an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, Educational Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Musicians, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music (by election) and the Royal College of Organists (by examination). Professor Norris gives papers this season at conferences at the Oslo Musikkhogskole, the Royal College of Music, Gresham College, the University of Southampton, the British Library, in Buxton for the ISM, and in the Three Choirs Festival, and is a guest lecturer in the Universities of Oxford, Bristol, Sussex and West Michigan. Norris increasingly works with children with special educational needs, and in July will give a series of Elgar workshops in Broadmoor: Elgar himself was a therapeutic musician at the Worcester Lunatic Asylum.

David Owen Norris 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, the Gresham Professor of Music in the City of London and the First Gilmore Artist.