 | This article needs to be updated.(November 2023) |
Ian Munro (born 1963) is an Australian pianist, composer, and music educator. His career has taken him to many countries in Europe, Asia, North America, and Australasia.
| This article needs to be updated.(November 2023) |
Ian Munro (born 1963) is an Australian pianist, composer, and music educator. His career has taken him to many countries in Europe, Asia, North America, and Australasia.
Ian Munro attended Scotch College in Melbourne for his high school education. [1]
He then attended the Victorian College of the Arts (1981–83). His early piano training was in Melbourne with Rodney Hurst, Marta Rostas (a pupil of Béla Bartók), Deirdre Vadas and Roy Shepherd (a pupil of Alfred Cortot) and he had further study in Vienna, London and Italy with Franz Zettl, Noretta Conci, Guido Agosti, and Michele Campanella. [2]
Munro's solo repertoire includes both rare and unusual works of the 19th and 20th centuries (such as those by his compatriots Katharine Parker, [3] Ernest Hutcheson and Arthur Benjamin [4] ) and he also has a special interest in new music. He has premiered or commissioned works by Peter Sculthorpe, Elena Kats-Chernin (her second piano concerto), [3] Roger Smalley, John Woolrich, Andrew Ford (The Waltz Book, a series of 60 waltzes lasting one minute each), [5] Gordon Kerry, [3] [ better source needed ] Ann Ghandar, Raffaele Marcellino, Ross Edwards and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, from whom he commissioned the piano cycle Silhouettes. These pieces were dedicated to significant 20th-century composers such as Debussy, Gershwin, Ives, Ravel, Schnittke, Stravinsky – and John Cage, which in true Cage style consisted of 33 seconds of silence. [6]
During his time in Hobart he created and played a series of four recitals, "One Hundred Nineteens", in 1999, comprising one work from each year of the 20th century. [7]
In 2003, he performed a piano recital to an audience representing a wide range of Sydney's music community, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Bechstein presence in Australia. [8]
He has over 40 piano concerti in his repertoire, which includes the standard repertoire as well as such pieces as Hans Werner Henze's epic concerto Requiem. [7] He has performed with all the major orchestras in Australia, as well as orchestras in New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Portugal, Russia, the USA, and China, and in the UK (the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia, English Chamber Orchestra, London Mozart Players, BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra). He has broadcast widely for the BBC. [2] Munro has accompanied singers such as Gerald English and Yvonne Kenny. In chamber music he has appeared alongside artists such as Leslie Howard, David Pereira, Ruggiero Ricci, Erich Gruenberg, Daniil Shafran, Oleh Krysa, Krszysztof Smietana, Karina Georgian, Jane Manning, the Australia Ensemble, [9] the Medici, Belcea and Goldner String Quartets, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, [2] and the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra. [7] [10]
Munro has a special interest in the music of Arthur Benjamin as a result of meeting Benjamin's pupil Joan Trimble in 1990, and has recorded many of his little-known piano pieces. For his Benjamin recordings, he has also written a short biography of the composer, filling a serious gap in the literature. [11] [12] His other writings include a biography of Katharine Parker. [13]
Munro has recorded a wide range of music for ABC Classics, Hyperion, Cala, Naxos (including Marco Polo), Tall Poppies and Alto. His recordings include his own realisations of some unfinished piano pieces by Franz Schubert; [14] and Russell Gilmour's Keating Tangos and Whitlam Rags projects. [3] Other composers represented in his recordings include Albéniz, Arensky, Don Banks, Beethoven, Lennox Berkeley, Brahms, Nigel Butterley, Chopin, Ross Edwards, César Franck, Gershwin, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Stephen Heller, Keith Humble, Adolf Jensen, Gordon Kerry, Liszt, Litolff, David Lumsdaine, Martinů, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Jean Louis Nicodé, Henryk Pachulski, Katharine Parker, Vincent Plush, Saint-Saëns, Peter Sculthorpe, Roger Smalley, Zygmunt Stojowski, [15] Carl Vine, Martin Wesley-Smith, and Malcolm Williamson. [7]
Munro is the first Australian to win the Grand Prix at the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition for composers in Belgium (2003), [2] with his piano concerto Dreams, which then became a set piece for the twelve finalists in the piano section of that year's competition. [3] [16] The work was broadcast across Europe on radio and television, and was performed in Russia. [3]
Munro has an interest in music for children, as reflected in the Children's Concerto (1999) and Lucy's Book (1993–2006). [3] Other works include Drought and Night Rain (2005), O Traurigkeit (2006), and Blue Rags (2005), which was nominated for the APRA Orchestral Work of the Year 2006 and has been recorded for ABC Classics. There is also a piano quintet called Divertissement sur le nom d'Erik Satie (2006), telling the story of a day in the life of Erik Satie. [17] A piano trio, Tales from Old Russia was written in 2008. [3] As well as commissioning rags from other composers, Ian Munro has written his own rags, such as Bad Girl Rag, dedicated to William Bolcom. [18]
In 2011 he was Musica Viva's composer-in-residence. [19]
Ian Munro headed the piano department at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music between 1995 and 1999, then joined the staff at the University of New South Wales and at the Australian National Academy of Music. [3] He has taught masterclasses in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand and for eleven consecutive years at the Dartington International Summer Festival in the UK. [7]
He has been a director of Musica Viva and a member of the Artistic Committee of Chamber Music Australia. [17]
He has been a juror on various competitions, including:
In 2011 Munro was living in Newcastle, New South Wales with his wife Helen English, a musicologist, and their children. [19]
Vladimir Davidovich Ashkenazy is a Russian solo pianist, chamber music performer, and conductor. Born in the Soviet Union, he has held Icelandic citizenship since 1972 and has been a resident of Switzerland since 1978. Ashkenazy has collaborated with well-known orchestras and soloists. In addition, he has recorded a large repertoire of classical and romantic works. His recordings have earned him five Grammy awards and Iceland's Order of the Falcon.
Elena Davidovna Kats-Chernin is a Soviet-born Australian composer and pianist, best known for her ballet Wild Swans.
Zygmunt Denis Antoni Jordan de Stojowski was a Polish pianist and composer.
John Roger Smalley was an Anglo-Australian composer, pianist and conductor. Professor Smalley was a senior honorary research fellow at the School of Music, University of Western Australia in Perth and honorary research associate at the University of Sydney.
Carl Edward Vine, is an Australian composer of contemporary classical music.
Richard John Mills is an Australian conductor and composer. He is currently the artistic director of Victorian Opera, and formerly artistic director of the West Australian Opera and artistic consultant with Orchestra Victoria. He was commissioned by the Victoria State Opera to write his opera Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1996) and by Opera Australia to write the opera Batavia (2001).
Ross Edwards is an Australian composer of a wide variety of music including orchestral and chamber music, choral music, children's music, opera and film music. His distinctive sound world reflects his interest in deep ecology and his belief in the need to reconnect music with elemental forces, as well as restore its traditional association with ritual and dance. He also recognises the profound importance of music as an agent of healing. His music, universal in that it is concerned with age-old mysteries surrounding humanity, is at the same time connected to its roots in Australia, whose cultural diversity it celebrates, and from whose natural environment it draws inspiration, especially birdsong and the mysterious patterns and drones of insects. As a composer living and working on the Pacific Rim, he is aware of the exciting potential of this vast region.
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Matthew John Hindson AM is an Australian composer.
Piers Lane is an Australian classical pianist.
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Dennis Hennig was an Australian pianist.
David Pereira is an Australian classical cellist, considered one of the finest working today. He was Senior Lecturer in Cello at the Canberra School of Music from 1990 to 2008. Later he worked there as a Distinguished Artist in Residence. Since April 2017 he again teaches cello there as a Senior Lecturer.
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Gordon Kerry is an Australian composer, music administrator, music writer and music critic.
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