Benjamin Grosvenor

Benjamin Grosvenor is an important contemporary British pianist known for his fresh interpretations of piano repertoire from the Romantic era. He began his career at 11 years old, as the winner of the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition of 2004, and now as a mature artist, he’s widely admired for his balance of virtuosic technique and expressive musicality. Grosvenor was born in 1992 in Southend-on-Sea, England, and he has four older brothers. His father taught English and drama, and his mother was a professional piano instructor. He initially began learning to play the piano from his mother when he was six years old. Grosvenor later attended the Westcliff High School for Boys and studied piano with Hilary Coates and Christopher Elton. He gave his first recital in 2003, and he also performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 later that year with his school orchestra. In 2004, he won the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition, in the keyboard division, and he became a student of Daniel-Ben Pienaar and Julian Perkins at the Royal Academy of Music. He participated in the 2005 BBC documentary “Being a Concert Pianist,” and in 2009 he recorded his first album, This and That, which included the works of Nikolai Kapustin, Domenico Scarlatti, and others. He became a BBC New Generation Artist in 2010, and in 2011 he entered a contract with the Decca Classics label. The following year, he completed his bachelor’s degree in music at the Royal Academy, and his first album with Decca, Chopin Liszt Ravel, won a 2012 Gramophone Award for best instrumental album. His next three releases, Rhapsody in Blue (2012), Dances (2014), and Homages (2016) were also critically acclaimed. In 2016, he earned a fellowship at the Royal Academy, and he was awarded the Ronnie and Lawrence Ackman Classical Piano Prize. He collaborated with violinist Hyeyoon Park in 2019 on the album Many Voices: 10 New Pieces for Violin. Grosvenor’s 2020 release Chopin Piano Concertos was awarded both a Gramophone Award and the prestigious Diapason d’Or de l’année. In 2021, he performed debuts with the Chicago Symphony led by Paavo Järvi and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra led by Maxim Emelyanychev. That same year, he also released the album Liszt under a renewed contract with Decca, and he was the artist in residence at Wigmore Hall. Grosvenor toured Europe and the U.S., and his reputation as a master interpreter of Chopin led to his participation in the “Chopin and His Europe” festival in Warsaw. He released Schumann & Brahms in 2023, and began a tour of the U.S. and Latin America with the Doric String Quartet and as a solo artist. ~ RJ Lambert