Catherine Duncan is a Scottish pianist currently based in London. She is active both as a soloist and chamber musician and gives regular performances throughout the UK.

 

She is passionate about music as an instrument of dialogue and about classical performance as a powerful means of bringing people together.

 

Catherine loves to curate programmes which allow works to be heard with a fresh perspective and which draw upon little explored links between composers. As a semi-finalist of the BBC Scotland Young Classical Competition she recently featured on BBC Radio Scotland playing Villa-Lobos and Ginastera. She has given solo recitals in Rome, Dunblane and in Birmingham performing a programme which included solo works by Bach and Rachmaninov, and culminated in Rachmaninov’s Transcription of Bach’s Violin Partita in E major.

 

Highlights of last year's schedule included a performance of Ravel's G Concerto with the Frome Symphony conducted by Mark Gateshill in the final night of the 2022 Frome Festival, as well as concerts with the Kisumba Trio in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Haddington, Derby and Birmingham.

 

Catherine completed her final year of undergraduate study with Alasdair Beatson at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire where she was supported by the Malcolm Bullock Memorial Trust Award. There, she was recently awarded the Marjorie Hazlehurst Piano Award, given to a student “whose Major Project demonstrates the greatest imagination, enterprise and highest level of performance.” This project entailed Catherine performing Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 15 in an arrangement for piano and string quintet by Vincenz Lachner with colleagues from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. She has received a scholarship to undertake an Artist Masters at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where she is studying with Carole Presland.

 

Before moving to Birmingham, Catherine studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Junior Department with Claire Haslin. During these formative years she also studied violin with Kathleen Simans. Her experience at the Junior Conservatoire deeply impacted her, fostering a love not only of music and performance but of the intrinsic value of musical connection. This instilled in her a strong desire to give what she had received back to the next generation and fulled her passion for music education.