Ian Munro (pianist)

Ian Munro (born 1963) is an Australian pianist, composer, writer and music educator. His career has taken him to over 30 countries in Europe, Asia, North America and Australasia.

Biography

He was born in Melbourne in 1963, and attended Scotch College. His early piano training was in Melbourne with Marta Rostas (a pupil of Béla Bartók) and Roy Shepherd (a pupil of Alfred Cortot) and he had further study in Vienna, London and Italy with Noretta Conci, Guido Agosti and Michele Campanella.

Ian Munro the pianist

He won second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1987, and has also won prizes at piano competitions in Spain (the Maria Canals competiton), Italy (the Ferruccio Busoni competition), and Portugal (the José Vianna da Motta competition).

His solo repertoire includes both rare and unusual works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (such as those by his compatriots Katharine Parker, Ernest Hutcheson and Arthur Benjamin) and he also has a special interest in new music. He has premiered or commissioned works by Peter Sculthorpe, Carl Vine, Elena Kats-Chernin (her Piano Concerto), Roger Smalley, Andrew Ford (The Waltz Book, a series of 60 waltzes lasting one minute each, and the song cycle Domestic Advice, Gordon Kerry, and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, from whom he commissioned a set of piano works with a rag feel. These pieces were dedicated to significant 20th century composers such as Debussy, Gershwin, Ives, Ravel, Schnittke, Stravinsky – and John Cage, which in true Cage style consisted of 33 seconds of silence.

He created and played a series of four recitals in 1999 comprising one work from each year of the Twentieth Century. In 2003, he performed a piano recital to an audience representing a wide range of Sydney's music community, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Bechstein presence in Australia. He has over 40 piano concerti in his repertoire, which includes the standard repertoire as well as such pieces as Hans Werner Henze's epic concerto Requiem. He has performed with all the major orchestras in Australia, as well as orchestras in New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Portugal, Russia, the USA, and China, and in the UK (the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia, English Chamber Orchestra, London Mozart Players, BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra). He has broadcast widely for the BBC.

In chamber music he has appeared alongside artists such as Leslie Howard, David Pereira, Gerald English, Yvonne Kenny, Ruggiero Ricci, Erich Gruenberg, Daniil Shafran, Oleh Krysa, Krszysztof Smietana, Karina Georgian, Jane Manning, the Australia Ensemble, the Medici, Belcea and Goldner String Quartets, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, and the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra. He is a National Board Member of Musica Viva Australia and a member of the Artistic Committee of Chamber Music Australia.

Ian Munro has a special affinity with the music of Arthur Benjamin and has recorded many of his little-known piano pieces. For one of his Benjamin recordings, he included a spoken introduction by Joan Trimble, who was a student and colleague of Benjamin's, and who premiered his best-known work, Jamaican Rhumba. He has also written a biography of the composer, filling a serious gap in the literature. His other writings include a biography of Katharine Parker.

Ian Munro has recorded a wide range of music for ABC Classics, Hyperion, Cala, Naxos (including Marco Polo), Tall Poppies and Warehouse. His recordings include his own realisations of some unfinished piano pieces by Franz Schubert; and Russell Gilmour's Keating Tangos and Whitlam Rags. Other composers represented in his recordings include Albéniz, Arensky, Don Banks, Beethoven, Lennox Berkeley, Brahms, Nigel Butterley, Chopin, Ross Edwards, César Franck, Gershwin, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Stephen Heller, Keith Humble, Adolf Jensen, Gordon Kerry, Liszt, Litolff, David Lumsdaine, Martinů, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Jean Louis Nicodé, Henryk Pachulski, Katharine Parker, Vincent Plush, Saint-Saëns, Peter Sculthorpe, Roger Smalley, Zygmunt Stojowski, Carl Vine, Martin Wesley-Smith, and Malcolm Williamson.

Ian Munro the teacher

Ian Munro headed the piano department at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music between 1995 and 1999, then joined the staff at the University of New South Wales and at the Australian National Academy of Music. He has taught masterclasses in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand and for eleven consecutive years at the Dartington International Summer Festival in the UK.

He has been a juror on various competitions, including the 2004 Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year Award and the 2008 New Zealand Kerikeri National Piano Competition, to which Munro donated $10,000 of his own money to the first prize winner.

Ian Munro the composer

Ian Munro is the first and only Australian to win the Grand Prix at the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition for composers in Belgium (2003), with his piano concerto Dreams, which then became a set piece for the twelve finalists in the piano section of that year's competition. The work was broadcast across Europe on radio and television, and was performed in Russia.

Being a parent himself, Ian Munro has an interest in music for children, as reflected in the Children's Concerto (1999) and Lucy's Book (1993-2006). Other works include Drought and Night Rain (2005), O Traurigkeit (2006), and Blue Rags (2005), which was nominated for the APRA Orchestral Work of the Year 2006 and has been recorded for ABC Classics. There is also a piano quintet called Divertissement sur le nom d'Erik Satie (2006), based on a series of paintings and telling the story of a day in the life of Satie. A piano trio, Tales from Old Russia was written in 2008. He is currently writing a song cycle for Elizabeth Campbell, a chamber symphony for the Australia Ensemble and a piece for Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He has also been commissioned to write two string quartets and a second piano quintet.

As well commissioning rags from other composers, Ian Munro has written his own rags, such as Bad Girl Rag, dedicated to William Bolcom.