Roderick Chadwick

British pianist Roderick Chadwick has been a major force in contemporary music, as both a performer and an educator at the Royal Academy of Music. Chadwick was born in Manchester, England, in 1978. When he was seven, a piano teacher, Heather Slade-Lipkin, spotted his interest in a harpsichord and suggested a keyboard lesson, which turned into a ten-year relationship. Chadwick attended Chetham's School, moving on to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and then the Royal Academy of Music, where his teacher was Hamish Milne. Chadwick earned the Masco Carner Fellowship in 1997-1998, and joined the staff of the Royal Academy the following year. He has performed around Europe, Britain, the U.S., and Asia, including at the Seoul Arts Centre, Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, Wigmore Hall, and others. Chadwick has also founded his own Plus-Minus Ensemble and has performed with other chamber groups. In the 2010s he has recorded energetically for the Naxos label, performing mostly but not exclusively contemporary music; his debut with the label was a 2013 recording of Leopold Godowsky's Twelve Impressions. The following year, for the Metier label, he recorded Michael Finnissy's completion of the fragmentary Grieg Piano Quintet in B flat minor with the Kreutzer Quartet. In 2018 he performed on recordings of chamber music by Gloria Coates (for Naxos) and Jeremy Dale Roberts (for Toccata Classics). Chadwick has experimented with unusual instruments and media, performing Jim Aitchison's composition Portraits for a Study: the work involved playing a Yamaha Disklavier and having his performance transmitted by Internet to various audiences in London, who saw an apparently playerless piano. In performance he has been especially associated with the music of Messiaen, whose Ile de Feu originally inspired him to devote his career to the piano; he is the co-author (with Peter Hill) of a book about that composer's Catalogue d'Oiseaux. ~ James Manheim