Among the world’s most admired pianists. Sought after and praised for his distinctive sound, he is described as “poetic and gently ironic, brilliant yet clear-minded, intelligent but not without humour, all translated through a beautifully clear and singing touch” (The Independent).

Grosvenor became the youngest-ever winner of the BBC Young Musician Competition at age 11. At 19 he became the youngest British musician ever signed by Decca Classics; his first album won the Gramophone award for best instrumental album of the year. He has also won the Classic Brits Critics’ Award, UK Critics’ Circle Award for Exceptional Young Talent, and a Diapason d’Or Jeune Talent Award. Grosvenor has been featured in two BBC television documentaries, BBC Breakfast and The Andrew Marr Show, as well as in CNN’s Human to Hero series. Since 2011 he has appeared eight times at BBC Proms.

In January, 2019 he was named by Gramophone as one of “Piano’s Golden Generation,” a list of five artists who are leading the way among today’s classical pianists. Steinway Society is delighted to  present this gifted and notable pianist to the Silicon Valley community.

1. Äußerst bewegt (Extremely animated), D minor
2. Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch (Very heartfelt and not too fast), B-flat major
3. Sehr aufgeregt (Very agitated), G minor
4. Sehr langsam (Very slow), B-flat major/G minor
5. Sehr lebhaft (Very lively), G minor
6. Sehr langsam (Very slow), B-flat major
7. Sehr rasch (Very fast), C minor/E-flat major
8. Schnell und spielend (Fast and playful), G minor

1. Předtucha (“Foreboding”) (Con moto)
2. Smrt (“Death”) (Adagio)

1. Lentamente (No. 1)
2. Andante (No. 2)
3. Allegretto (No. 3)
4. Con una dolce lentezza (No. 18)
5. Con eleganza (No. 6)
6. Pittoresco (Arpa) (No. 7)
7. Ridicolosamente (No. 10)
8. Con vivacità (No. 11)
9. Assai moderato (No. 12)
10. Allegretto tranquillo (No. 9)
11. Feroce (No. 14)
12. Dolente (No. 16)

Blumenstück (“flower piece”), an intimate character piece from 1839, comprises several short sections that vary in mood between wistful longing and robust declamation. Set in an elegantly proportioned rondo-like structure, the piece recalls the composer’s Op. 18 Arabeske, a similarly graceful and charming work of the same year. Clara Wieck, whom Schumann was finally able to marry the next year after a prolonged separation, considered the Blumenstück to be one of Robert’s finest pieces and made it a regular staple of her own concert programs.

Schumann claimed to have written Kreisleriana, a set of eight fantasy pieces dedicated to Chopin, in just four days in 1838, though he made subsequent additions to the work and revised it in 1850. He considered it to be one of his finest compositions. Inspired by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fictional Johannes Kreisler, a moody and passionate composer, Kreisleriana is a masterpiece of the Romantic style. The work’s contrasting sections exhibit the dual aspects of Schumann’s psyche—Florestan, the wild and impetuous upstart, and Eusebius, the introspective dreamer. Musically encoded throughout is an expression of Schumann’s “very wild love” for his as-yet unattainable fiancée.

The first movement surges in a tempestuous D minor that contrasts with a plaintive and dreamlike central section in B-flat. The longest movement, beginning also in an introspective B-flat, tinged with melancholy, follows; it interpolates two intermezzi, one each in B-flat and G-minor, keys that will predominate throughout the rest of the work. The third movement is extremely agitated but again features a dreamlike central section. Harmonic instability is reinforced in the ponderous fourth, the passionate fifth, and the slowest and most meditative movement, the sixth; each starts or ends on a dominant or dominant seventh rather than a tonic chord. The seventh and stormiest movement goes harmonically even further afield, commencing with a precipitous plunge into C minor; the movement features a central fugato section and ends in a slow and chorale-like E-flat major. The dark and evocative set ends in G minor in a dotted-rhythm will-o’-the-wisp gigue that gradually fades away to a whisper, concluding on a single triple-pianissimo low G. The opening key of the work, D minor, was never heard again.

Janáček wrote 1. X. 1905 in protest: on the date memorialized in the title, a 20-year-old woodworker was killed by Austrian soldiers while he took part in demonstrations for the establishment of a Czech-language university in Brno. The sonata was originally cast in three movements, but Janáček destroyed the third movement before it could be performed. In 1906, he hurled the remaining movements into the Moldau; the sonata was saved from oblivion only because the pianist who had premiered the two-movement version had kept her performance copy.

The sonata demonstrates Janáček’s idiosyncratic style, influenced by folksong and the distinctive patterns of Czech speech. The work features explosive jabbings and jarring laments. The first movement, conveying fear and foreboding, is largely in sonata form. The second movement, likewise in a gloomy E-flat minor, is almost unbearably dramatic; its repeated rests on the first beat suggest a gasping for breath. Fortissimo clashes and tremolos depict the armed conflict, but the main theme returns, its life force ebbing away, until at last it falls silent. On the title page, Janáček attached an epigraph: “The white marble of the steps of the Brno Guildhall. The labourer František Pavlík falls, stained with blood. He came only to champion higher learning but was struck down by cruel murderers.”

Prokofiev composed the Op. 22 miniatures, entitled “fleeting visions” after a line from the poet Balmont, between 1915 and 1917, often performing one or two of them as encores. The works display the full range of Prokofiev’s musical language, ranging from sardonic and aggressive mockery to lugubrious melancholy and delicate lyricism. They demonstrate a variety of compositional techniques, including bitonality, quartal harmony, white-key melodies, parallel chords, dissonant grace notes, and extended chromaticism. Several of the pieces, though whimsically dissonant and evincing a playful naiveté, recall the earlier impressionism of Debussy.

During the 19th century, touring pianists regularly performed operatic pastiches, often little more than clap-trap bravura featuring showy passagework. Liszt elevated the genre to a high art, often performing one or more of his 60-odd paraphrases during his tours of the 1830s and 1840s. The brilliant pianist Marie Pleyel, the former fiancée of Berlioz and estranged wife of the piano manufacturer Camille Pleyel, had requested a virtuosic showpiece from Liszt. In 1841 he obliged, composing no fewer than three operatic réminiscences—a term he coined to characterize a free fantasy rather than a close paraphrase—on Bellini’s Norma, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. Schott’s publication of Liszt’s Norma fantasy in 1844 featured a facsimile of the dedicatory letter in which Liszt addressed Pleyel as his “dear and ravishing colleague,” provoking an explosion from the Countess d’Agoult. Liszt refused to remove the dedication despite her angry insistence.

The Réminiscences de Norma masterfully summarizes Bellini’s opera, artfully weaving together seven of its most beloved themes—excluding, however, its most famous aria, “Casta diva.” The fantasy’s cascades of arpeggios, dazzling roulades, prolonged passages in octaves and tenths, and dangerous leaps demand the utmost virtuosity. The work traverses the full expressive range of the opera from the high drama of its opening chords, to the tragic gloom of the central aria, and finally to one of the greatest climaxes in Liszt’s music, a conclusion of transcendent ecstasy.