Biography

Active internationally for over 25 years as an administrator, collaborative pianist, scholar, recording producer and festival director, Professor Bernard Lanskey is Dean of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore. Before moving to Singapore in 2006, he was a member of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama’s Directorate, as Assistant Director of Music (Ensembles & Postgraduate Studies) from 1994. He is currently President of the Southeast Asian Directors of Music Association (SEADOM), and also a co-opted Council member of the European Association of Conservatoires (AEC).

As a pianist, he has performed throughout Australia, Southeast Asia, China, Great Britain and in most European countries, working principally with string players and singers in chamber music, mixed recital and lecture-recital combinations. Since 2005, he has been an Artist-in-Residence at La Loingtaine, France. He performs regularly with violinists Aki Saulière and Qian Zhou, German soprano Felicitas Fuchs, and Australian pianist Stephen Emmerson, with whom he also engages in artistic research experiments.

Over the past decade, he has performed also with violinists Siow Lee-Chin, Joshua Bell, Kam Ning, Zuo Jun and Renaud Capuçon, soprano Katherine Broderick, cellists Qin Li-Wei, Pierre Doumenge, Michael Kannen and Francois Salque, and pianists Daniel Tong and Jeffrey Sharkey, as well as in a range of other chamber music combinations. From 1996-2006, he worked regularly for British television journalist John Suchet in his theatrical presentation, Beethoven, the Last Master.  He is also active as a speaker in multiple contexts with recent keynote or plenary presentations in Singapore, Australia, China, Malaysia, Norway and Thailand.
Originally from North Queensland, Australia, he was awarded a First Class degree at the University of Queensland in 1981 before moving to more specialised pianistic studies, first in Paris (with support from the Alliance Française Australia) and then at the Royal College of Music in London (supported by the Florence Davey Scholarship) where he completed a Master’s degree with Peter Wallfisch in 1988.

Recordings have included: Intimate Correspondences, featuring music by Brahms and Schumann inspired by Clara Schumann (with Aki Saulière and Felicitas Fuchs); The Inner Line, featuring four-hand piano music by Brahms, Schubert and Andrew Schultz (with Stephen Emmerson); Suspended Preludes, featuring chamber music by Andrew Schultz; and Clarinet: North South East West with Marcel Luxen and Qin Li-Wei. He has organised a range of festivals and concert series, in association with the London Symphony Orchestra’s Discovery Series at St. Luke’s in London, as Artistic Director of the 20th and 21st Paxos International Music Festivals in Greece, the Hadstock Music Festivals in the UK, at La Loingtaine in France and for the University Summer Academy in Lausanne in 2011. In November 2012, he was invited to be President of the jury for the Geneva International Music Competition.

His research interests build out from his longstanding activity as a collaborative pianist and chamber music coach, focusing particularly on the vital role of metaphor and gesture in the pedagogical process or in performance and performance preparation. Recent publications include From Audacious Vision to Impactful Reality: An Extraordinary Journey Worthy of Orpheus in Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance (Leuven, 2017),  Playing with Variables: Anticipating One Particular Performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (with Stephen Emmerson) in Mathemusical Conversations: Mathematics and Computation in Music Performance and Composition (World Scientific, 2016), and Educating Musicians in a Southeast Asian Context: The Next New World in Musik 2015-16 (Lucerne Music Academy, 2016). Most recently, he has been drawing from fields such as cognition, microbiology, mathematics and literature, seeing in them potential to be contemporary metaphorical interpretative catalysts.

As a recording producer, he has produced for Decca, Centaur and Cello Classics.