I have been fascinated by music and science all of my life. As a child, I was addicted to my Thomas Salter chemistry set and Philips electronics set, and put together various radios, transmitters and amplifiers. When I began piano lessons aged 10, my enthusiasm for music meant that I was able to perform pieces by Rachmaninoff only 15 months after having learned to read middle C in the bass clef.
I spent my early high school years involved in competitive swimming and represented Northern Ireland as a junior. When I bowed out of this heavy commitment at 15, I transferred this energy into piano practice, made rapid progress and unexpectedly found myself a regional winner in the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition.
At this point, I changed direction and instead of studying science as I had originally planned, I went to London to study piano with John Bingham, the only British student of the famous Soviet pianist Stanislav Neuhaus. This formative experience has influenced the development of my style and repertoire; lots of Russian music and post-Romantic exotica such as Godowsky and the transcription repertoire. I have performed this repeatedly in London, Germany and Japan and I include recordings of these, as well as standard repertoire, on this website. Whilst a student, I also made a number of broadcast recordings for BBC Northern Ireland including sonatas by Mozart, Liszt and Prokofiev.
My passion for “Golden Age” performance practice and the desire to achieve faithful reproduction of old gramophone records led me to revisit my interest in electronics, and as a result I have designed and built various pre- and power music amplifiers and microphone pre-amplifiers using both solid state and valve designs. The successful outcome of this effort led me to embark on a BSc degree in Physics, which I completed in 2014. I regularly undertake private commissions for bespoke design and manufacture of this type of equipment.
Throughout this entire period, I have been active as a piano teacher, and several of my students have gained places to study Music at Oxford, Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Music.