Peter Donohoe was born in Manchester in 1953. He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music with Derek Wyndham and then in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod. Since his unprecedented success as joint winner of the 1982 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, he has developed a distinguished career in Europe, the USA, the Far East and Australasia. He is acclaimed as one of the foremost pianists of our time, for his musicianship, stylistic versatility and commanding technique.
During the 2005/06 season Peter Donohoe’s engagements include concerto performances with Sakari Oramo with the Royal Concertgebouw and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestras. He will also undertake a major tour to Russia and play solo recitals in London, Vienna and Moscow. In April and May 2007 he will perform the complete works for piano and orchestra by Tchaikovsky with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Last season, Peter Donohoe’s orchestral concerts included the London Philharmonic/Jurowski, Deutsche Oper Berlin/Märkl, Bergen Philharmonic/Litton, Munich Philharmonic/Metzmacher and Oregon Symphony. He also performed on a major tour with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with their Music Director James Judd.
In 2002 Peter Donohoe played with the Berliner Philharmoniker in Sir Simon Rattle’s opening concerts as Music Director. He has also recently performed with all the major London Orchestras, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Swedish Radio, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Vienna Symphony and Czech Philharmonic Orchestras. He was an annual visitor to the BBC Proms for seventeen years and has appeared at many other festivals including six consecutive visits to the Edinburgh Festival, La Roque d’Anthéron in France, and at the Ruhr and Schleswig Holstein Festivals in Germany. In the United States, his appearances have included the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit Symphony Orchestras. Peter Donohoe has worked with many of the worlds’ greatest conductors including Christoph Eschenbach, Neeme Jarvi, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Andrew Davis and Yevgeny Svetlanov.
Peter Donohoe is a keen chamber musician and performs frequently with the pianist Martin Roscoe. They have given performances in London and at the Edinburgh Festival and have recorded discs of Gershwin and Rachmaninov. Other musical partners have included the Maggini Quartet, with whom he has made recordings of several great British chamber works.
In 2001, Naxos released a disc of music by Finzi, the first of a major series of recordings which aims to raise the public's awareness of British piano repertoire through concert performance and recordings. Discs of music by Rawsthorne, Bliss, Darnton, Rowley, Ferguson and Gerhard have now also been released to great critical acclaim.
Peter Donohoe has made many fine recordings on EMI Records and has won awards for them including the Grand Prix International du Disque Liszt and the Gramophone Concerto award for the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto no. 2. His recordings of Messiaen with the Netherlands Wind Ensemble for Chandos Records and Litolff for Hyperion have also received widespread acclaim.
