Kenneth Hamilton

Pianist, writer, and educator Kenneth Hamilton has proposed a significant reevaluation of performance practices connected with the virtuoso piano repertory of the late Romantic era and has realized his ideas through performances and recordings. Hamilton is also a noted educator, serving as professor, dean, and head of the School of Music at Cardiff University in Wales.
Hamilton was born in 1963. He attended Balliol College at Oxford University, studying musicology as well as piano performance and receiving a doctoral degree for a thesis on Liszt’s music. His teachers were Alexa Maxwell, Lawrence Glover, and Ronald Stevenson, a composer whose music Hamilton has played and recorded on two volumes entitled Kenneth Hamilton Plays Ronald Stevenson in 2016 and 2019, respectfully. As a performer, he has focused on music of the extreme virtuoso tradition, principally that of Liszt, Alkan, and Busoni, as well as Stevenson, whose compositions fall directly into that tradition. He has toured widely and has appeared multiple times in Singapore, among other international locations. Hamilton’s monograph Liszt: Sonata in B minor was published by Cambridge University Press in 1996, and he also served as editor of The Cambridge Companion to Liszt (2005). Hamilton’s most widely discussed written work is After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (2008), in which he argued that modern notions of fidelity to the musical score had eliminated components of varied repetition and other improvisatory or non-notated practices from performances of Romantic piano music. In support of his thesis, Hamilton pointed to documented practices of Ignacy Jan Paderewski and other figures from the so-called golden age of pianism around the beginning of the 20th century. Hamilton has demonstrated his ideas in several releases on the Prima Facie label, including Back to Bach, an album of Romantic Bach tributes (2017), and Preludes to Chopin (2018), which treated Chopin’s Preludes as actual key-matched preludes to larger Chopin works. More Preludes to Chopin was issued in 2020. Hamilton released the album Romantic Piano Encores in 2021, and the first of a Kenneth Hamilton Plays Liszt appeared the following year. ~ James Manheim