Susan Tomes grew up in Edinburgh and was the first woman to be admitted to study music at King’s College, Cambridge. She has made over fifty discs of solo, duo and chamber music as well as hundreds of radio recordings made around the world. Many of her discs are on Hyperion, with whom she is proud to have been associated for many years. Though she performs all kinds of piano music from concertos and recitals to light music, she is especially renowned for her achievements in chamber music. For fifteen years she was the pianist of the chamber group Domus, and for another fifteen she was the pianist of The Florestan Trio, one of the world’s leading trios. Parallel to her work with these two groups, she has been the pianist of The Gaudier Ensemble for seventeen years. She has won a number of awards including three Gramophone Awards, a Classic CD Award and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award.

She is committed to the task of opening up classical music for listeners, and in recent years this has inspired her to write about it as well as performing it. She is the author of two books, Beyond the Notes and A Musician’s Alphabet, and has finished writing on a third book about performance. She writes for The Guardian, reviews books for The Guardian and The Independent, and has written and presented programmes on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. She also gives masterclasses, sits on competition juries and award panels, gives seminars, and is a keynote speaker at dinners and conferences. She now writes a blog on her website, www.susantomes.com.