British pianist
Andrew West has been among the most active and versatile collaborators in chamber music, vocal music, and duo piano music. He has also been the longtime director of the Bridging Arts Chamber Music Festival in Nuremberg, Germany (formerly the Nuremberg International Chamber Music Festival), and has made that festival a focus for the promotion of British music on the European continent.
West was born in Tayport, Scotland on May 5, 1979. He attended Clare College at Cambridge University, where he studied English, earning a master's degree before switching to music and studying piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music. In 1990,
West took second prize at the Geneva International Piano Competition and served as pianist-in-residence at Lancaster University from 1993 to 1999. He has toured South America, South Africa, and the U.S. as a solo pianist. The bulk of his activities since the turn of the century, however, have involved collaboration.
West has performed and recorded as an accompanist to an unusually wide range of artists. These have included ongoing major partnerships with tenor
Mark Padmore and flutist
Emily Beynon; with the latter he recorded the complete works of flute and piano by the group of French and Swiss composers known as Les Six. But his list of collaborators also includes other singers (including
Sarah Fox,
James Gilchrist,
Susan Gritton, and Håkan Vramsmo; chamber groups (the
Lyric Quartet, with whom he has
recorded an album of music by
Howells), and other instrumentalists (including violinist
Sarah Chang, clarinetist
Emma Johnson, and cellist
Jean-Guihen Queyras). He has performed duo piano music with, among others,
Cédric Tiberghien, and he has organized his own piano quartet, Touchwood. In 2018 alone,
West appeared as accompanist on three albums: with
Fox,
Gilchrist, and
Roderick Williams on two volumes of songs by Hubert Parry; and with
Cristo Barrios on
Deep Light, an album of clarinet-and-piano works. In addition to his work in Nuremberg,
West is chairman and artistic director of the Kirckman Concert Society, which works to develop young musicians and shepherd them through a debut recital at London's Southbank Centre or Wigmore Hall. He teaches accompaniment courses at the Royal Academy of Music and serves as a vocal coach at Guildhall.