CLIVE BRITTON
Piano
Commenting on Clive Britton’s recital at Wigmore Hall in London, Stephen Pettit wrote in The Times:
“[...] The balance between natural extroversion and poetical insight held one captivated from the first note to the last”
Clive Britton trained entirely under the guiding hand of Claudio Arrau. Arrau, a pupil of Martin Krause – himself a pupil of Franz Liszt – handed down Liszt’s artistic philosophy, analytical technique and discipline with the piano to future generations, and Clive Britton is a first-hand example of that process.
Regularly invited to perform by leading European and US concert institutions, he receives particular acclaim for his performances of Schumann’s entire piano opus, Schubert’s last three sonatas and Beethoven’s Sonatas in connection with the mainstays of Romantic piano literature. He holds recitals and seminars on the philosophical interaction between music, visual art and literature, spawned by the performance of Liszt’s Trois Années de Pèlerinage. He holds courses, seminars and piano masterclasses in England, France and Italy, where he also conceived – and has been running since 2018 – the Arrau Piano Surgery, a course based on an innovative didactic approach at the Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado in Milan, in partnership with Steinway Italia.
Britton is the founder and artistic director of Camerata Asolo devised to establish a creative environment in which today’s leading musicians can work to apply, develop, document and hand down to young musicians the basic principles of musical traditions and executive practices that would otherwise be in danger of disappearing. His audio-visual documentation is the first digital archive of its kind, an information and virtual education tool open to all. He founded, and still directs, the Music FestiValGardena, alongside which he established a chamber music and soloist academy from 1996 to 2002, inviting lecturers and musicians of the calibre of Barry Tuckwell, Norbert Brainin, Robert Cohen, Maria Kliegel and Richard Stoltzman.
He is the artistic director of Brera/Musica at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, where musicians and art historians engage in dialogue to explore the ways in which the language of art is expressed in music and painting.