Charles Owen

Pianist Charles Owen maintains an active schedule as a concerto soloist and chamber musician throughout Britain and Europe. Together with frequent duo partner Katya Apekisheva he founded the London Piano Festival; he also holds a professorship at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama and maintains a separate commitment to teaching. Among his many recordings the most recent is the 2024 Avie release The Young Schumann.

Born in Cambridge in 1971, Owen spent his childhood in Hampshire and Worcestershire. Music played no part in family life—his father served as a clergyman, his mother worked as a teacher, and his brother later designed race cars for Mercedes—yet a member of his father’s congregation recognized the boy’s ability and supplied early lessons. He was soon admitted to the Yehudi Menuhin School in Stoke d’Abernon, where Seta Tanyel guided his studies. He continued at the Royal College of Music under Imogen Cooper and Irina Zaritskaya. In the mid-1990s he collected several important prizes, among them the silver medal awarded at the 1995 Scottish International Piano Competition; selected performances from that event appeared on the competition’s annual disc, and his first commercial recording followed in 1996 on Dorian, when he accompanied cellist Christoph Stradner on Turn of the Century Cello. His initial solo album, Janáček: Piano Music, came out on Somm in 2003.

As soloist he has performed with British ensembles that include the Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and he has appeared abroad with the Łódź Philharmonic and the Moscow State Academic Symphony. Chamber-music partnerships have taken him to the Takács, Wihan and Sacconi Quartets as well as to collaborations with violinists Sarah Chang, Renaud Capuçon and Augustin Hadelich. With Katya Apekisheva he has recorded Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Petrushka in piano-duo versions for Quartz (2018); further recordings have appeared on Signum Classics, Orchid Classics and, most frequently, Avie. In education he serves on the Guildhall faculty, holds a visiting professorship at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff, and delivers master classes and school sessions in his capacity as U.K. Ambassador for Steinway & Sons.