David Owen Norris

David Owen Norris
United Kingdom

David Owen Norris, the first winner of the Gilmore Artist Award, has played concertos all over North America and Australia, along with several appearances in the BBC Proms. A television programme entirely devoted to his work on the Elgar Piano Concerto, ending with a spectacular live performance of the whole work, has been shown frequently. In January 2016 he recorded his own Piano Concerto in C with the BBC Concert Orchestra.

Norris began his career by accompanying such artists as Dame Janet Baker, Sir Peter Pears & Jean-Pierre Rampal, and has enjoyed long-standing partnerships with Ernst Kovacic, Sir John Tomlinson, and the late Philip Langridge. His unusually varied career has also seen him as a repetiteur at the Royal Opera House, harpist at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Artistic Director of the Petworth Festival & the Cardiff International Festival, Gresham Professor of Music, and Chairman of the Steans Institute for Singers at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago.

Norris has been a familiar face on music television since 1990, when he presented The Real Thing?: Questions of Authenticity on BBC2, described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the most probing and literate programme on music seen for a long while’. He has helped make BBC2’s PromsExtra one of the most watched classical music programmes in the world.

David Owen Norris is Professor of Musical Performance at the University of Southampton, and Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music and at the Royal Northern College of Music.