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Daniel-Ben Pienaar

Daniel-Ben Pienaar is active as recitalist and chamber musician. He has a particular interest in early music and in the Viennese classics and early romantics, devoting his time to recording and performing, studying and reading, and teaching at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he is the Curzon Lecturer in Performance Studies.

Born in South Africa, he came to public notice there at the age of fourteen, performing Liszt's E-flat concerto, and shortly afterwards Beethoven's Emperor, with the country's most prominent orchestras. After winning the South African National Youth Music Competition and the University of South Africa Overseas Music Scholarship he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy of Music, where he was in the piano class of Christopher Elton, and where Laurence Dreyfus' imaginative response to the early music debate, and Jonathan Freeman-Attwood's understanding of the creative possibilities of recording made a deep impact. Upon graduating from the Academy in 1997 he received the prestigious Queen's Commendation.

Eschewing the competition circuit he set out on a programme of self-imposed study and repertoire learning. In 1999 he first played the set of six partitas by Bach in one concert; 2000 saw a Mozart piano sonata cycle at the Academy. Since then he has, aside from these works, also variously given complete performances of Bach's Goldberg Variations and Well-Tempered Clavier, Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, Schubert's twelve major piano sonatas, the Chopin ballades and waltzes, in addition to a representative selection of, mostly,19th-century works.

Much of 1999-2005 was spent travelling extensively in Japan with the popular violinist Narimichi Kawabata, playing a diverse duo repertoire and solo recitals.

A summer of immersion in Bach in 2002 led to his first recording – two days of sessions devoted to The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 in 2003. This was released on the small independent label Prometheus Editions. These session tapes were revisited in 2007 for a revised edit, now released online on Magnatune. The Bach recording in 2003 was followed a few months later by the Chopin ballades for Victor Japan.

The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2, recorded in autumn 2004, appeared on Magnatune in 2005. Re-mastered versions of both books are to be published in the near future.

The keyboard works of Jacobean master Orlando Gibbons followed in 2006 – the first complete recording of this oeuvre – recasting the output as idiomatically pianistic and as a single recital. This was released to acclaim by Deux-Elles in 2007.

Mozart's Viennese piano sonatas (nos. 10-18) were recorded over three days in 2008, and the nine remaining sonatas over two days in 2009. This is the first recording that Pienaar also edited himself. The complete set was released by Avie in November 2010 and received outstanding notices.
His most recent recordings are of Bach's Goldberg Variations and the Fourteen Canons BWV1087 (September 2010), and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations and Op. 126 Bagatelles (September 2011).

Currently he is absorbed in the Beethoven sonatas, tentatively working on a number of Chopin compositions, and compiling another 17th-century recital. Future plans for the studio include returning to the Schubert sonatas and Bach partitas. Recitals planned for 2013 include performing at the Singapore International Piano Festival, playing the two books of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on consecutive nights at London's King's Place (as part of their 'Bach Unwrapped' festival) and chamber music at Kioi Hall in Tokyo.

Recent collaborations have included re-imagining music from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries for the unlikely combination of trumpet and piano, with Jonathan Freeman-Attwood. Four discs, mostly of Pienaar's own arrangements, have so far been recorded for the Linn label. Further chamber music activities have included performing Bach's Art of Fugue on harpsichords and chamber organs with Martin Knizia, playing a wide repertoire with violinist Giovanni Guzzo and, most recently, the Brahms violin sonatas with Peter Sheppard-Skaerved at Wilton's Music Hall.
Since 2005 Daniel-Ben Pienaar has been a member of the Royal Academy of Music teaching faculty with a small class of piano students, also assuming a variety of roles as lecturer and chamber music coach. His undergraduate teaching has included elective courses on Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Piano Sonatas 1778-1854. He runs an interpretation seminar for master's degree students with cellist Neil Heyde and curates a series of repertoire and performance practice workshops for postgraduate pianists. Public talks on a wide range of performance-related topics are also a regular feature of his teaching. He views the performer's position in relation to the canonic repertoire as radically 'late' – both with respect to the works themselves, and to the performance traditions and great recorded performances that surround them. That implies taking critical stock of a gamut of expressive means, drawn from a variety of practices, in a personal and idiosyncratic way, and setting the (near-impossible?) challenge of making music without taking recourse to a ready-made 'interpretative' philosophy or niche.

In addition to his other areas of interest his fascination with the recording process extends also to producing CDs for the Academy's own recording label, including such diverse ventures as 'American Icons' (symphonic brass) and ensemble arrangements of Frank Zappa.