Neil Georgeson is a pianist, writer, composer and director from the Shetland Islands. He appears regularly and widely as a solo pianist and chamber musician, and has performed as a soloist all over the world, and at UK venues such as King's Place, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Barbican, St David's Hall in Cardiff, the Colston Hall in Bristol and the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh, as well as more unconventional venues like the Glastonbury Festival and the Village Underground, and at contemporary music nights Kammerklang and Nonclassical. He has appeared at festivals such as 'Soundings' at the Austrian Cultural Forum, the York Late Music Festival, Sounds New, and the Johnsmas Foy in Shetland, for which he was commissioned as a composer. He has worked with a great many illustrious composers on their music such as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Martin Bresnick, Diana Burrell, Bent Sørensen and Jonathan Harvey. Neil performs in a piano duo with James Young, specialising in the Viennese repertoire, giving their London debut at The Forge in Camden in 2014 for the Park Lane Group. He has also performed with the London Contemporary Orchestra, the Arcomis Ensemble, the Kammerklang Ensemble, the Continuum Ensemble, the Riot Ensemble, and is a member of Europe's only six-piano group, Piano Circus.
Neil Georgeson
Artistic Director
Piano, Keyboards, Organ
He enjoyed a prize-winning academic career on scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with Patsy Toh, Joanna Macgregor and Ian Fountain. He completed a Masters degree with a highly-acclaimed thesis on the role of the performer in classical music, which became the exemplar dissertation for Masters students, then became a Fellow at the Academy working with composers on new music.
Also having a theatre background, Neil devises theatre pieces, writes scripts and creates improvised music-theatre. He has written three opera libretti – KETTLEHEAD for Darren Bloom of the Ossian Ensemble, which premiered in summer 2013 at the Grimeborn and Tete a Tete opera festivals in London, Angela – an inverted love story for Corin Buckeridge, which ran in Autumn 2013 and which won the Best Opera Award in the Off West End awards, and Njogel for James Young, which premiered last year to great acclaim - “put together with exceptional care and skill, and full of wit and originality”, “playful and beautiful, a unique, highly textured lyric voice”.James Young he also created the improvised music-theatre show Event001. He has directed, produced and written music and text for a cross-disciplinary tour of Taiwan with Veronica Yen, Piano Theatre, also directing and producing. He is very interested in cross-disciplinary performance, appearing as a dancer in a show at the Barbican with Bluemouth Inc for Dance Umbrella, and working as an actor with YouMeBumBumTrain on two shows, and with performance artists (such as Emma Smith and Emily Roysdon) on several events at the Tate Modern and at galleries and art fairs further afield. For the Ossian Ensemble, Neil has written text as dramatic narrative in concerts, directed new chamber opera and created site-specific promenade events incorporating theatrical elements and multimedia.