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Biography |
by Joseph Stevenson
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Imogen Cooper is a highly respected English pianist, especially known for her Mozart performances and recordings.
Her early piano studies were so promising that at the age of 12 she was sent to the Paris Conservatoire to study with Jacques Février and Yvonne Lefébure. While there, she won a First Prize in piano. After graduation, she continued her studies in Vienna with Alfred Brendel, Paul Badura-Sckoda, and Jörg Demus. After returning to London, she won the 1969 Mozart Memorial Prize.
She maintains a career as a solo recitalist, as a vocal accompanist, as a chamber player, and as a soloist with orchestra. She performed extensively in Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan. Her most frequent voice recital partner is Wolfgang Holzmair, with whom she has recorded the major Schubert Lieder cycles Schwanengesang, Winterreise, and Schöne Müllerin on Philips. She recorded Schubert's piano trios with Raphael Oleg and Sonia Wieder-Atherton (BMG France) and Schubert's late piano works (Ottavo). She has recorded several of the Mozart piano concertos to high acclaim, and maintains most of the mature ones (from No. 9 onwards) and the five Beethoven concertos in her active repertoire, plus the Chopin concertos, the Ravel G major, the Schumann, and the Bartok Third.
Her first concerto performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra resulted in an immediate re-invitation to play with that orchestra under Seiji Ozawa in a Carnegie Hall concert. She also frequently appears with the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, the Stockholm Chamber Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra of Japan, the Dresden Staatskapelle, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. She is a participant in the Harrods International Piano Series, which takes her to major recital venues in Europe.
In 1996 she joined a chamber group comprised of members of the Berlin Philharmonic to give the premiere of a piano quintet, Voices of Angels, written by Brett Dean (the group's violist). She commissioned a solo work, Traced Overhead, by the rapidly rising young British composer Thomas Adčs, which she premiered in 1996. |
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