David Owen Norris


Norris is an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, Professor of Musical Performance at the University of Southampton, Visiting Professor of Fortepiano at the Royal College of Music, Educational Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Musicians, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and of the Royal College of Organists. He is the Director of Music at Poole Parish Church. He was Organ Scholar at Keble, and left Oxford with a First and a Composition Scholarship to study in London and Paris. He was a Repetiteur at the Royal Opera House, and Harpist at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has been Artistic Director of the Cardiff International Festival and the Petworth Festival, Chairman of the Steans Institute for Singers at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, and the Gresham Professor of Music in the City of London.

In the last twelve months or so, David Owen Norris has played English music across the UK, in Amsterdam, Dresden, Berlin, Taipei, San Diego, Chicago, and in the Gilmore Festival in Michigan, celebrating the 20th anniversary of his appointment as the first Gilmore Artist.

His projects with the musicians’ collective THE WORKS (‘a treasure trove’ BBC Radio 3;‘a treasure house’ Sunday Times) included his Haydn adaptation A New Creation, where six hundred children sang, played and danced in Winchester Cathedral, with Timothy West as the Book of Genesis; Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the newly reconstructed Dresden version in Poole; and further performances of the widely travelled operatic sequence 2 Murders & a Marriage incorporating Norris’s new radio-opera Pugwash walks the plank, which was also featured at the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House. He is currently working on another radio-opera, The Body in the Ballroom.

Concerts later this year include Schumann chamber music at King’s Place; Brahms’s Magelonelieder in Rotterdam with David Wilson-Johnson; and a week of Mozart in Oslo.

Norris’s recent radio work has included Building a Library on Brahms’s Six Piano Pieces Op.118, and on Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque; programmes on Haydn and on composers who died in 1934 (Elgar, Delius and Holst); and the theme tune and incidental music for Radio 4’s six-week series A History of Home. His programme Jane Austen’s iPod, broadcast at the beginning of the year, was so well received that he is currently working on a whole iPod series culminating in Dickens’s iPod on Christmas Day.

Norris’s recordings released this year include Britten’s songs to Scottish texts with Mark Wilde – the first time they have been recorded by a Scot; Beethoven viola music with Paul Silverthorne, recorded on an 1865 Blumel piano; songs and piano pieces from newly discovered volumes of the Austen family music collection, with Amanda Pitt and John Lofthouse, recorded on JB Cramer’s 1817 Broadwood; Mendelssohn songs with Amanda Pitt and Mark Wilde, recorded on Sigismund Thalberg’s 1845 Erard; and the complete Songs without Words, incorporating important new discoveries about Mendelssohn’s musical syntax, recorded on Gustav Holst’s 1850 Collard & Collard bi-chord grand.