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The Australian pianist and music pedagopgue, Bernard Lanskey, he was awarded a First Class degree at the University of Queensland in 1981, before moving to more specialised pianistic studies, first at Schola Cantorum Paris (Class of 1982; 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 of Music degree with Peter Wallfisch in 1988.
Music has taken Bernard Lanskey around the world, interacting with musicians across more than 40 countries and all continents in projects centred in Asia, Europe, Northern American and Australia. As a pianist, he has performed throughout Australia, Southeast Asia, China, Great Britain and in most European countries, working and recording principally with string players and singers in chamber music, mixed recital and lecture-recital combinations, drawing also on insights garnered from philosophy, cognition and nature. In his most recent work he has focused on the middle and late repertoire of a succession of pianist-composers - W.A. Mozart, L.v. Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Debussy, Johannes Brahms - each of whom also saw chamber music and song as central to their compositional life. 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, Bernard Lanskey 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 to 2006, he worked regularly for British television journalist John Suchet in his with whom he has performed throughout Great Britain, offering lecture-recital presentations on L.v. Beethoven and Johann Strauss. He is also active as a speaker in multiple contexts with recent keynote or plenary presentations in Singapore, Australia, China, Malaysia, Norway and Thailand.
After his studies, Bernard Lanskey, was appointed as a member of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama’s Directorate, one of the world’s leading performing arts institutions, where he served for 18 years (1988-2006) , as Assistant Director of Music (Ensembles & Postgraduate Studies) from 1994. In August 2006, he was appointed Dean of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore. Today, with over 25 years of experience as an administrator, collaborative pianist, scholar, recording producer and festival director, he is one of Singapore’s most influential musical educators. He received the Public Administration Medal (Silver) at Singapore’s 2019 National Day Awards. 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).
Recordings have included: "Intimate Correspondences", featuring music by Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann inspired by Clara Schumann (with Aki Saulière and Felicitas Fuchs); "The Inner Line", featuring four-hand piano music by Clara Schumann, Schubert and Australian composer Andrew Schultz (with Stephen Emmerson) for Australian label Tall Poppies; "Suspended Preludes", featuring chamber music by Andrew Schultz; and Clarinet: North South East West with Marcel Luxen and Qin Li-Wei. As a recording producer, he has produced for Decca, Centaur and Cello Classics.
Bernard Lanskey has organised a range of festivals and concert series in Australia, the UK, Greece, France and Switzerland: 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 (Since 2005, he has been an Artist-in-Residence) 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. |
