John Reid

The British pianist John Reid has been an active and versatile player with several specialties: chamber music, song accompaniment, and contemporary piano music. He also has a growing career as an educator. Reid began his career as a boy chorister and then took up the organ. He attended Clare College at Oxford University and played the organ, took conducting classes, and studied musicology. "I was a decent all-rounder," he told The Cross-Eyed Pianist. But he did not take up the piano until adulthood, studying at the Royal Academy of Music with Michael Dussek among others. Gravitating toward accompaniment, he won the Gerald Moore Award in 2004 and has been much in demand from singers, including mezzo-soprano Diana Moore and, in the late 2010s, countertenor Iestyn Davies. Reid has played chamber music with groups from the early music realm (The Sixteen) up to that of modern times (the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group). As a soloist he has performed select Mozart piano concertos with the London Haydn Project and, on an ongoing basis, the Aurora Orchestra, with whom he has performed a complete Mozart cycle at London's Kings Place. At that venue he was also asked in 2013 to program a concert series devoted to Benjamin Britten on the occasion of that composer's centenary, including new works as well as those by Britten. He has also performed regularly with Britain's Royal Northern Sinfonia. He made his German debut in 2017, playing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15, with the Deutsche Philharmonie Merck in Darmstadt. Reid has made several recordings: with his teacher Dussek he issued an album of solo and duo piano music of York Bowen on the Dutton Vocalion label, and in 2018 he backed trumpeter Matilda Lloyd on her debut album, Direct Message. At the Royal Academy of Music Reid holds the posts of Chamber Music Administrator and Chamber Music Coach. ~ James Manheim