Pianist Nicolas Hodges has built a reputation as a leading interpreter of contemporary scores through sustained partnerships with figures such as Wolfgang Rihm and Harrison Birtwistle, while also maintaining a profile as an influential teacher.
Born in London in 1970 to a mother who sang with the BBC Singers and a father who worked as a BBC studio manager and pursued music as an amateur, Hodges received his earliest schooling at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford. There he first appeared in public as a boy treble within the Christ Church Cathedral Choir. Subsequent studies took him to Winchester College, followed by university work at Cambridge and Bristol. His principal instructors were Susan Bradshaw and Sulamita Aronovsky; he further trained in song accompaniment under Roger Vignoles and Geoffrey Parsons and studied composition with Michael Finnissy, Robin Holloway, and Alexander Goehr.
He has appeared with numerous prominent orchestras and established recurring associations with several, among them the BBC Symphony, the Boston Symphony, and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. His strongest ties, however, remain with leading composers of the present day. Birtwistle once described him as his Peter Pears—an allusion to the singer who championed Benjamin Britten’s music—while additional close collaborators include Rihm, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Rebecca Saunders. In 2003 he gave the premiere of Elliott Carter’s piano concerto Dialogues and has also presented works by Brian Ferneyhough, John Adams, Beat Furrer, and Pascal Dusapin, alongside Beethoven and other staples of the classical repertoire.
More than twenty-five recordings document his activity, beginning with the 2000 Col Legno release Bill Hopkins: Complete Piano Music. Subsequent discs have appeared on Kairos, Wergo, Nonesuch, and additional labels. On Bridge he can be heard in a 2005 account of Carter concertos that includes Dialogues. Until 2020 his discography remained devoted exclusively to contemporary music; that year he issued A Bag of Bagatelles, pairing bagatelles by Beethoven with those of Birtwistle.
