LONDON PIANO FESTIVAL

London Piano Festival is delighted to return to Kings Place from 4-6 October 2024. Three days of classical and jazz piano performances will see Festival debuts from exceptional pianists Lara Melda, Kit Armstrong, Rose McLachlan, Michael Wollny and Reinis Zariņš. Other instruments feature in the Festival lineup for the first time with the esteemed Carducci String Quartet performing in the Mozart gala, and pianist and writer Susan Tomes returns to close this year’s Festival.

 

We will open this year’s Festival with a Mozart Gala, featuring three of Mozart’s finest early piano concerti, alongside Lara Melda, the winner of the 2010 BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. We'll be joined by the internationally renowned Carducci String Quartet in special arrangements of these works for string quartet and double bass (Stacey Watton).

 

We will take to the stage together once again with a Fauré Salon 100 programme, celebrating the composer’s centenary year. The recital, designed to evoke the intimate setting of a 19th-century Parisian salon, spotlights Fauré alongside his composer contemporaries, Mel Bonis and Cecile Chaminade. We will alternate solo compositions with works for piano duet, concluding with Fauré’s ever-popular Dolly Suite.

 

Rose McLachlan, winner of the Chopin Prize at both Chetham’s and the Royal Northern College of Music, makes her Festival – and Kings Place – debut with 22 pieces inspired by Chopin’s 22 Nocturnes, all by talented (but previously unpublished) female composers. 16 works were chosen from 80 scores submitted by women composers around the world, with the remaining six commissioned by established composers, such as Zoe Rahman.

 

The London Piano Festival typically features jazz in its lineup, and in Armstrong meets Wollny, two world-class performers come together for a special collaboration: classical pianist Kit Armstrong and jazz pianist Michael Wollny. Both artists will return to Kings Place in their Festival debut for a unique solo and duo improvisation set.

 

Award-winning Latvian pianist Reinis Zariņš makes his London Piano Festival debut with Olivier Messiaen’s epic cycle, Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus, composed during the darkest days of the Second World War. Writer and broadcaster Stephen Johnson will explore the historical context of the work in an insightful pre-concert talk.

The Festival closes with Women and the Piano, a recital from pianist and writer Susan Tomes. Taking her new book of the same name as a starting point Susan performs a series of compositions by women composers over the last 200 years, including Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, Cecile Chaminade and Amy Beach. There will be a post-concert Q&A with Susan hosted by Tim Parry, Editor of our media partner International Piano magazine.

 

Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, Co-Artistic Directors of the London Piano Festival