Concert Four
Leigh Harrold piano
- Frederic Chopin
- Fantasy Op.49
- Leopold Spinner
- Fantasy Op.9
- Raymond Chapman Smith
- Notebook
- Quentin Grant
- New work
- Luke Altmann
- New work
Leigh Harrold
piano
Pianist Leigh Harrold has emerged in recent years as “a musician of rare talent and intelligence” (The Advertiser) and is one of Australia’s busiest and most sought-after piano players, recently winning the Adelaide Critics’ Circle prize for Best Emerging Artist of 2005.
Born in Whyalla, South Australia, Leigh completed undergraduate and post-graduate studies in Adelaide with concert pianist Gil Sullivan. During this time he had many competition successes including being a National Finalist in the Young Performer Awards, a semi-finalist in the Lev Vlassenko Piano Competition, twice winner of the Geoffrey Parsons Memorial Award and recipient of the prestigious Beta Sigma Phi Classical Music Award. He moved to Melbourne in 2003 to take up a full scholarship at the Australian National Academy of Music and in 2004 was made the Academy Fellow — the first person in the institution’s history to be chosen as such after just one year of study.
As a soloist, Leigh has performed with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, the ANAM Chamber Orchestra and the Elder Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra. He has premiered works by Australian composers in Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide and been broadcast on ABC-FM, 3MBS, 4MBS and 5MBS. He maintains a fruitful and ongoing relationship with the composers of The Firm and has had several piano works written for him as a result. He was their Performer in Residence for 2006.
As a chamber musician he has earnt an international reputation, having performed as duo partner with such luminaries as Thomas Reibl, lecturer in viola at the Salzburg Mozarteum; Michael Cox, principal flautist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; Daniel Gaede, ex-concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; Swedish cellist Mats Lidstrom; and British pianist Mark Gasser. Of the performance with the latter, The Melbourne Age remarked, “As an advertisement for the high standard of public music-making produced by the academy, it would be hard to go beyond the experience of hearing [the] overpowering, white-hot expression of compressed ecstasy realised with extraordinary cohesion and eclat by these gifted young musicians.”
