SOMM Recordings sends warmest congratulations to Peter Donohoe – a “lion of the keyboard” and “one of our greatest home-grown performers” – on his 65th birthday.
A some-time pupil of Derek Wyndham, Alexander Goehr, Olivier Messiaen, Yvonne Loriod and Vlado Perlemuter, Peter began his career as a timpanist with the BBC Philharmonic but came to international attention as a pianist when he won the Silver Medal at the 1982 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow.
His mentors’ wide-ranging influences and his association with Russian music have continued to be the bedrock of a career that has seen him performing with the world’s leading orchestras and as a soloist of incomparable intelligence, imagination and probing musicality.
A master technician without peer, Peter is no less an accomplished poet of the piano, his repertoire interests ranging from Malcolm Arnold to Michael Tippett, Olivier Messiaen to James MacMillan, Hamilton Harty to Hans Werner Henze and many points in between.
For SOMM, he has recorded the complete Sonatas by Prokofiev in three volumes – “Donohoe’s authoritative playing shines through… a wonderful anthology”, said one approving reviewer – and a two-CD set of Scriabin’s complete Sonatas. That prompted another critic to compliment Donohoe on his “intelligently big pianism”.
Those steps led naturally on to what BBC Music Magazine described as the “continuous revelation” of Peter’s thrilling double-disc survey of Stravinsky’s music for piano solo and piano and orchestra.
His latest release couldn’t be more different: a compendium of pieces for one, two and three pianos by Mozart with Valerie Tryon and Mishka Rushdie Momen. But, like everything Peter does, it dazzles with his characteristically illuminating attention to detail and idiomatic brilliance.
Hailed as a phenomenon in Moscow almost 40 years ago, Peter remains a musician of incomparable power and poetry. One whose interrogation of the repertoire is unrivalled and whose command of the keyboard is unmatched. SOMM Recordings is proud to be associated with a British musical treasure and salute him on the occasion of his 65th birthday.