Profile
Philip Mead studied at the Royal Academy of Music and became an international prize winner in contemporary music. He has been actively involved in contemporary music for many years and has performed throughout the world. He has worked closely with such composers as Stockhausen, Reich and Tippett and commissioned many new works. He has been at the forefront of developing a repertoire for piano and electronics working with all the major electronic composers including Jonathan Harvey, Denis Smalley, Javier Alvarez, Horacio Vaggione, Daniel Teruggi, Simon Emmerson and Stephen Montague. He has performed this repertoire extensively particularly in the group Montague/Mead Piano Plus,and with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris. Many of these works are available on CD.
Since 1997 Philip Mead has also been researching the possibilities of combining the piano with various brass and percussion ensembles, and has commissioned work from such composers as Diana Burrell, Nicholas Sackman and Geoffrey Poole. These works feature on a recent CD issued by NMC.
Amongst the piano classics of the Twentieth Century, the music of radical American composers has always had a central place in Philip Mead’s repertoire. He has performed the music of Charles Ives extensively in Britain and America and in 2001 Metier released a double CD of Ives’ complete solo piano music which became Observer CD of the week. This was followed by a double CD of the complete solo piano works of George Crumb on Metier and the complete solo repertoire of Stephen Montague on NMC. Future plans include a project to record the entire piano music of Henry Cowell. In 1996 Philip Mead made his debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall performing the Henry Cowell Piano Concerto with the American Symphony Orchestra during the Bard Festival, repeated at the Barbican in January 2004 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Philip Mead is Founder and Artistic Director of the British Contemporary Piano Competition, a past director of the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and has recently been appointed a research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire.