Fortepiano Recital: Expressive Style

Fortepianist John Reid explores aspects of the Empfindsamer Stil: a radical new musical current of expressivity, emotional fluidity and 'sensibility', championed (among others) by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in the mid-eighteenth century. This is music which still surprises and moves us today, in all its quirkiness and complexity. John's programme also includes music by Haydn: the joyful, florid Sonata in A Flat and the F-minor Variations, considered by many to be his finest, emotionally deepest keyboard work.

John Reid owes an enormous amount to his early musical education in Salisbury, both as a chorister and as Organ Scholar at the Cathedral; and he is delighted to take part in Salisbury Musick. He is a graduate of Clare College Cambridge and an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, where he is also a Professor of Chamber Music and Piano. A performer of unusually wide sympathies, he is equally acclaimed as an exponent of contemporary music, as a chamber musician, a singer's accompanist and a soloist.

Recent concert highlights include a UK and European tour of Carnival: a collaboration between Aurora Orchestra and physical theatre group Frantic Assembly, based on Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals; Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde at the Oxford International Song Festival (with singers Daniel Norman and Jess Dandy); and the first performance of Julian Anderson's Life Cycle, concerts to explore the chamber music of Salvatore Sciarrino and to mark the centenary of Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag – all with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He continues to explore Classical and Romantic repertoire on period instruments with violinist Sophia Prodanova and violinist-violist John Crockatt, and he contributed three times to the complete cycle of Mozart piano concertos at Kings Place in London.

John will be playing on a fortepiano which is a copy of Mozart’s own Walter made in the late 1980s by Paul McNulty for Trevor Pinnick. Walter was the most famous piano maker in Vienna in the late eighteenth century. Mozart owned and regularly used one of his instruments, which were known for their bright, clear tone.