Kenneth Hamilton

Kenneth Hamilton, active as pianist, author, and teacher, has advanced a thorough reassessment of how late-Romantic virtuoso piano works were once performed and has put those convictions into practice on stage and in the studio. He holds professorial rank at Cardiff University in Wales, where he has also served as dean and head of the School of Music.

Born in 1963, Hamilton read musicology and piano at Balliol College, Oxford, and earned his doctorate with a dissertation on Liszt. His principal instructors were Alexa Maxwell, Lawrence Glover, and Ronald Stevenson; the last of these composers Hamilton has repeatedly performed and documented on disc in the two volumes Kenneth Hamilton Plays Ronald Stevenson, issued in 2016 and 2019 respectively. His recital programs concentrate on the most technically demanding works of the Romantic tradition, above all those of Liszt, Alkan, and Busoni, together with Stevenson, whose own pieces belong squarely to the same lineage. He has given concerts across many countries, returning several times to Singapore.

Cambridge University Press brought out his monograph Liszt: Sonata in B minor in 1996, and he later edited The Cambridge Companion to Liszt (2005). The book that has attracted the widest attention remains After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (2008). There Hamilton contends that today’s insistence on literal adherence to the printed score has removed the varied repetition and other improvisatory habits that once characterized Romantic piano playing; he cites the documented freedoms taken by Ignacy Jan Paderewski and fellow pianists of the era traditionally called the golden age. Hamilton has illustrated these arguments on the Prima Facie label with Back to Bach, a collection of Romantic tributes to Bach (2017); Preludes to Chopin (2018), which presented Chopin’s Preludes in their original function as introductions to larger works in the same keys; the follow-up disc More Preludes to Chopin (2020); Romantic Piano Encores (2021); and the first installment of Kenneth Hamilton Plays Liszt (2022).