Steven Osborne OBE
One of today’s most illustrious pianists, Steven Osborne’s musical sympathies, both on record and in the concert hall, range from Mozart to Messiaen, Rachmaninov to Britten, Kapustin to Keith Jarrett. A Hyperion artist, he has also championed and recorded concertos by lesser-known figures such as Sir Donald Tovey and Sir Alexander Mackenzie. Scottish-born, he received his earliest piano lessons from Richard Beauchamp at Edinburgh’s St Mary’s Musical School before going on to Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music to study with Renna Kellaway. After winning first prize at the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in 1991 and the Naumburg International Competition six years later, he was selected as a BBC New Generation Artist in 1999, the first year of that scheme. A familiar and much-loved artist at the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival, he is as much at home on the concerto platform as in the recital hall, where his collaborators include the violinists Lisa Batiashvili, Alina Ibragimova and Christian Tetzlaff, the cellist Alban Gerhardt and fellow-pianist Paul Lewis with whom he has recorded four-hand repertoire by Schubert, Fauré, Stravinsky, Poulenc, Debussy and Ravel. An articulate and humorous speaker, some of his reflections, both musical and philosophical, can be found on his website: stevenosborne.com. When not playing or writing, he is to be found watching the big football and tennis competitions, making nachos, watching Netflix big box sets. He is married to the clarinettist Jean Johnson, with whom he has recorded the Brahms sonatas for clarinet and piano.
