Goldner String Quartet & Piers Lane
Biographie Goldner String Quartet & Piers Lane
Goldner String Quartet
Celebrating their twenty-fifth season in 2020, the Goldner String Quartet has a long-standing reputation, not only as Australia’s pre-eminent string quartet but as an ensemble of international significance, favourably compared with the best in the world. Launched in 1995 and still retaining all its founding members, the Quartet is named after Richard Goldner, founder of Musica Viva Australia. Unanimous audience and critical acclaim following their Wigmore Hall debut in 1997 ensured the Goldner Quartet’s invitations to prestigious UK and European festivals. Performances in the USA and throughout Asia have followed, in addition to several tours of New Zealand.
The Goldners’ recent UK appearances include performances at London’s Wigmore Hall with pianist Piers Lane (broadcast by the BBC), Leicester, and the Oxford May Music festival. They also performed in Ireland, and in Italy for the opening of the 2019 Biennale Arte in Venice.
The Quartet regularly appears at many of Australia’s leading music festivals including Musica Viva’s Sydney Festival, Music in the Hunter, and at Huntington Estate amongst others, in addition to being Quartet in Residence at the annual Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, North Queensland. The Goldner Quartet regularly tours for Musica Viva Australia as part of their International Concert Series.
Special projects have included a major twentieth-century retrospective, and an international project in celebration of Sydney’s sister cities. The Goldners’ recordings of the complete Beethoven string quartets—performed and recorded live across three weeks, and released on ABC Classics—won the 2009 Limelight Award for Best Classical Recording. The Quartet’s numerous recordings for Hyperion, in collaboration with pianist Piers Lane, have attracted rave reviews. The Quartet also has several other album releases on ABC Classics, Tall Poppies and Naxos. The Goldners’ own DVD documentary, The Quartets, recorded with Peter Sculthorpe, was released by ABC Classics.
Strongly committed to teaching the next generation of string quartets, the Goldners have mentored young ensembles through programmes of the Australian Youth Orchestra, Musica Viva Australia and the Sydney Conservatorium. New works by many of Australia’s leading composers have been regularly commissioned for the Goldners.
Piers Lane
London-based Australian pianist Piers Lane has a worldwide reputation as an engaging, searching and highly versatile performer, at home equally in solo, chamber and concerto repertoire. Five times soloist at the BBC Proms, Piers’s wide-ranging concerto repertoire exceeds 100 works and has led to engagements with many of the world’s great orchestras, working recently with conductors including Sir Andrew Davis, Vassily Sinaisky, Gerard Schwarz and Brett Dean. Festival appearances have included Aldeburgh, Bard, Bath Mostly Mozart, Bergen, Cheltenham, Como Autumn Music, Prague Spring, Rockport, La Roque d’Anthéron, Ruhr Klavierfestival, Schloss vor Husum, Seattle and the Chopin festivals in Warsaw, Duszniki-Zdrój, Mallorca and Paris.
Recent highlights include a standing ovation at Carnegie Hall for a performance of Busoni’s massive piano concerto; premieres of Carl Vine’s second piano concerto and (with Kathryn Stott) double piano concerto Implacable gifts, both written for Piers; concerto performances at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall and with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall; and annual solo recitals for the London Pianoforte Series at Wigmore Hall.
In 2015 Piers Lane was appointed Artistic Director of the Sydney International Piano Competition and is responsible for initiatives like the 2021 Online Piano Competition, the Piano Lovers’ Competition for amateur Australian pianists, and Composing the Future, a competition to help Australian composers during COVID times. He is a popular judge at international piano competitions and in 2021 judged the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition. His extensive collaborations with violinist Tasmin Little, actress Dame Patricia Routledge (in the Dame Myra Hess exploration Admission: One Shilling) and the Goldner String Quartet have been of major importance.
His extensive discography for Hyperion includes much-admired recordings of rare romantic piano concertos, the complete Malcolm Williamson piano concertos, the complete preludes and études by Scriabin, transcriptions of Bach and Johann Strauss, along with complete collections of concert études by Saint-Saëns, Moscheles and Henselt, and transcriptions by Grainger. He has also recorded eleven volumes of piano quintets with the Goldner String Quartet for Hyperion, many albums with Tasmin Little for Chandos, further solo and chamber recordings for EMI, Philips, Dutton and Unicorn-Kanchana, and Mozart concertos for ABC Classics.
Piers Lane was Artistic Director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music from 2007 to 2017, and from 2006 to 2013 directed the annual Myra Hess Day at the National Gallery in London. He has written and presented over 100 programmes for BBC Radio 3, including the fifty-four-part series The Piano.
In the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Birthday Honours he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished services to the arts. In 1994 he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, where he was a professor from 1989 to 2007. Piers holds Honorary Doctorates from two Australian universities—Griffith and James Cook—and in 2022 was awarded the Sir Bernard Heinze Memorial Award for service to music in Australia.
