IAN PACE

BIOGRAPHY

IAN PACE is a pianist whose uncompromising committment to musical modernism and unique combination of intellectual conceptualism and spontaneity in performance have won much admiration. He was born in Hartlepool, England in 1968, studied at Chetham's School of Music, The Queen's College, Oxford and, as a Fulbright Scholar, at the Juilliard School in New York. His main teacher, and a major influence upon his work, was the Hungarian pianist György Sándor, a student of Bartók.

Based in London since 1993, he has pursued an active international career, performing throughout Britain, Europe and the US. His absolutely vast repertoire of all periods focuses particularly upon music of the 20th and 21st Century, in particular the works of contemporary British, French, German and Italian composers as well as the 'classics' of modern music by composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Barraque, Xenakis, Ligeti, Nono, Kagel and Cage. He has given world premieres of over 100 pieces for solo piano, including works by Richard Barrett, Luc Brewaeys, James Clarke, James Dillon, Pascal Dusapin, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy (whose complete piano works he performed in a landmark 6-concert series in 1996), Christopher Fox, Volker Heyn, Howard Skempton, Gerhard Stäbler, Jay Allan Yim and Walter Zimmermann. He is renowned for ambitious and ingenious programming, and for his ability to surmount the most transcendental of pianistic challenges, often previously considered impossible. He has presented cycles of works including Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I-X, and the complete works of Kagel, Lachenmann and Ferneyhough. His many performances of the standard piano literature combine elements of historical performance with a modernist perspective to produce often startingly original interpretations. In addition to his activities as a soloist, Ian is the Artistic Director of the ensemble Topologies and regularly plays with other soloists and groups, most notably the Arditti Quartet.

Ian has played at most major European venues and festivals, including Festival D'Automne in Paris, Agora, IRCAM, Archipel, Geneva, Ars Musica in Brussels, International Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Berlin Bienalle, Wien Modern, the International Music Festivals in Aldeburgh, Bath, Cheltenham, Huddersfield and Oxford, Nuovo Consonanza in Rome, Sonorities in Belfast, Warsaw Autumn and the International Bartok Festival in Szombathély. Many of his recitals and recordings have been broadcast, by British, French, Belgian, Dutch, German, Swiss, Austrian, Italian, Polish and Australian Radio. He has recorded numerous CD's on the Metier, NMC, Black Box and Naive labels, which have been received with great critical acclaim.

Renowned for his astute and insightfulwritings on new music, Ian is in much demand as a lecturer. He regularly gives workshops and masterclasses as well as pre-concert talks. At the London College of Music and Media he is a member of the piano faculty and co-director of the course for the study of contemporary piano. He contributes to several music periodicals and co-edited the book Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy, published by Ashgate Ltd in 1997. He has recently been appointed an Arts and Humanities Research Board Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts from 2003-2006 at Southampton University, where he will be writing a further book on Finnissy. He also composes, in a mixed text/music medium, his "...quasi una fantasmagoria Op. 120 No. 2..." was premiered by himself and clarinettist Carl Rosman in October 2002; he also wrote a text set by composer Alwynne Pritchard in her Geometry of Pain 1, and is working on a collaboration for a major new song-cycle with Pritchard.

In 2000 Ian give recitals at, amongst others, the International Music Festival in Cheltenham and the Musica festival in Strasbourg and the world premiere of Brian Ferneyhough's Opus Contra Naturam, at the Flanders Festival in Belgium. In January 2001, he gave a critically-acclaimed first complete performance of Finnissy's five-and-a-half hour piano work History of Photography in Sound in January 2001, a feat repeated at the Flanders Festival in October 2001, and in Glasgow in December 2001. In March 2001, he also gave the premiere of new works by Pascal Dusapin and James Dillon at the Berlin Bienalle. Other recent events have included the premiere of Walter Zimmermann's new piano quintet with the Arditti Quartet in Graz, the premiere of Pascal Dusapin's Piano Concerto with the Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach in September 2002, and the premiere of Dusapin's complete Études for piano together with Beethoven's Diabelli Variations in concerts in Paris and Clermont-Ferrand. The current season also includes concerts in London (including a concert featuring the four piano sonatas of Horatiu Radulescu, the first complete performance of James Dillon's The Book of Elements, and a rare complete performance of Wolfgang Rihm's Klavierstücke 1-7), Strasbourg, Granada, Seville, Valencia, Vevey, Stuttgart, Vienna, Macerata, Pristina, Champaign-Urbana and Buffalo.