April 1 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Henry Lewis was born in 1999, and grew up in the Somerset countryside. He started playing the piano at the age of six, and until 2018 was a pupil of Catherine Miller in Bristol. For the 2017/2018 year Henry was the recipient of the European Piano Teacher’s Association’s John Bigg Scholarship, which also allowed him to take lessons with Murray McLachlan in Manchester, with whom he continued his studies full time at the Royal Northern College of Music. He is now in his final year of undergraduate studies at the RNCM in the class of Helen Krizos.
Henry has performed both solo and chamber music recitals extensively across the UK. Most notably in 2015, he had the pleasure of performing Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in F minor at renowned concert venue St George’s Bristol. More recently, in the summer of 2019 he gave a performance of the solo piano works of Adam Gorb (Head of Composition at the RNCM), including several world premieres over two concerts at the Stoller Hall in Manchester, as part of the Chetham’s International Piano Festival.
Henry has participated in various competitions; a prize winner in the EPTA UK Piano Competition several times, he was also a finalist in the RNCM’s concerto competition, highly commended for his performances of Mozart K537 and Brahms Piano Concerto no. 1.
Amongst others, he has participated in masterclasses with such artists as Angela Hewitt, Peter Donohoe, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Philippe Cassard, Joseph Banowetz, and Nelita True. Henry has also taken lessons in composition from Professor Philip Wilby and John Mcleod CBE.
During the 2020 lockdown Henry dedicated a significant part of his time to the research and performance of Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto and has since received guidance on the work from Steven Osborne. He also takes great joy in thinking and writing about music, and as part of the RNCM’s Insights Series, was invited by the college to conduct an hour long interview with Pierre-Laurent Aimard.