London-based Australian pianist Piers Lane has a worldwide reputation as an engaging, searching and highly versatile performer, at home equally in solo, chamber and concerto repertoire. Five times soloist at the BBC Proms, Piers’s wide-ranging concerto repertoire exceeds 100 works and has led to engagements with many of the world’s great orchestras, working recently with conductors including Sir Andrew Davis, Vassily Sinaisky, Gerard Schwarz and Brett Dean. Festival appearances have included Aldeburgh, Bard, Bath Mostly Mozart, Bergen, Cheltenham, Como Autumn Music, Prague Spring, Rockport, La Roque d’Anthéron, Ruhr Klavierfestival, Schloss vor Husum, Seattle and the Chopin festivals in Warsaw, Duszniki-Zdrój, Mallorca and Paris.

Recent highlights include a standing ovation at Carnegie Hall for a performance of Busoni’s massive piano concerto; premieres of Carl Vine’s second piano concerto and (with Kathryn Stott) double piano concerto Implacable gifts, both written for Piers; concerto performances at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall and with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall; and annual solo recitals for the London Pianoforte Series at Wigmore Hall.

In 2015 Piers Lane was appointed Artistic Director of the Sydney International Piano Competition and is responsible for initiatives like the 2021 Online Piano Competition, the Piano Lovers’ Competition for amateur Australian pianists, and Composing the Future, a competition to help Australian composers during COVID times. He is a popular judge at international piano competitions and in 2021 judged the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition. His extensive collaborations with violinist Tasmin Little, actress Dame Patricia Routledge (in the Dame Myra Hess exploration Admission: One Shilling) and the Goldner String Quartet have been of major importance.

His extensive discography for Hyperion includes much-admired recordings of rare romantic piano concertos, the complete Malcolm Williamson piano concertos, the complete preludes and études by Scriabin, transcriptions of Bach and Johann Strauss, along with complete collections of concert études by Saint-Saëns, Moscheles and Henselt, and transcriptions by Grainger. He has also recorded eleven volumes of piano quintets with the Goldner String Quartet for Hyperion, many albums with Tasmin Little for Chandos, further solo and chamber recordings for EMI, Philips, Dutton and Unicorn-Kanchana, and Mozart concertos for ABC Classics.

Piers Lane was Artistic Director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music from 2007 to 2017, and from 2006 to 2013 directed the annual Myra Hess Day at the National Gallery in London. He has written and presented over 100 programmes for BBC Radio 3, including the fifty-four-part series The Piano.

In the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Birthday Honours he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished services to the arts. In 1994 he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, where he was a professor from 1989 to 2007. Piers holds Honorary Doctorates from two Australian universities—Griffith and James Cook—and in 2022 was awarded the Sir Bernard Heinze Memorial Award for service to music in Australia.