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Pianist Piers Lane possesses a vast repertory of solo, chamber, and concertante works, which he has performed in more than 40 countries and on over 50 recordings. While he plays many standards by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Rachmaninov, he is unafraid to perform works by little-known composers.

Lane was born in London on January 8, 1958, and was raised in Brisbane, Australia. His parents were both pianists and young Piers showed rare talent early on. At age 12, he gave a broadcast recital over Australia's ABC Radio. Lane studied piano at the Brisbane Conservatorium with Nancy Weir. In 1977, he entered the Sydney International Piano Competition, and while he did not finish among the top prize-winners, he was named Best Australian Pianist. He later studied with Bela Siki at the University of Washington and at London's Royal College of Music, where his teachers included Yonty Solomon and Kendall Taylor. While making London his home, Lane steadily built his career in the 1980s. The Royal Overseas League named him Outstanding Musician of the Year in 1982. He made an acclaimed tour of Latin America in 1989, and that same year became professor of piano at London's prestigious Royal Academy of Music.

Lane's tendency to take risks has spilled over even into major concert appearances: at his 1991 Wigmore Hall recital, he performed two Schnittke works, Variations on a Chord and Improvisations and Fugue, and at his 2006 appearance at Lincoln Center with the American Symphony Orchestra, Lane played the lengthy and rarely heard piano concerto of Arthur Bliss. In the chamber realm, Lane has regularly collaborated with violinist Tasmin Little, cellist Alexander Baillie, and clarinetist Michael Collins. Lane has made numerous major concert tours since the 1990s as his recordings were also drawing notice, like the complete Scriabin etudes (1993) and the complete Saint-Saëns etudes (1998), both on Hyperion. Lane made over 100 appearances on BBC Radio 3, most notably as the presenter and writer of the ambitious 54-part broadcast series The Piano.

Lane has made numerous recordings in the Romantic Concerto Series for the Hyperion label, performing concertos by the likes of Stanford, Parry, Sinding, Alexander Dreyschock, and other neglected composers. Besides Hyperion, Lane has recorded for EMI, Danacord, Chandos, and other major labels. In the new century, Lane has continued apace with successful major debuts and recordings. His 2004 debut at Lincoln Center led to his acclaimed return concert in 2006 with the Bliss concerto. In 2007, Lane accepted the post of artistic director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, holding this position until 2017. He served in the same capacity for the Myra Hess Day celebrations at London's National Gallery from 2006 until 2013. At the 2009 events, he performed music by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and other composers as actress Patricia Routledge portrayed Hess in a theater work devised by Hess' great-nephew, Nigel Hess. The event was so successful that further performances by Lane and Routledge were given throughout England and Europe. Lane was named the artistic director of the Sydney International Piano Competition in 2016. In 2020, he released several albums, including Hyperion's 81st volume of the Romantic Concerto Series, and he accompanied Little on Chandos' third volume in the British Violin Sonatas Series. Lane returned in 2023 on Hyperion with the album Piers Lane Goes to Town Again, a sequel to 2013's Piers Lane Goes to Town; both albums featured short encore-type pieces, some of them influenced by or coming from the realm of popular music. By that time, Lane's recording catalog comprised some 60 items. ~ TiVo Staff

Frederick Delius was an English composer who forged a unique version of the Impressionist musical language of the early 20th century. His reflective, gently lyrical music has a sound that was influenced more by international trends than by British musical traditions.

Delius was born in Bradford, England, in 1862. He did not come from a musical family; rather, his father owned a wool company and hoped that his son would follow a career in business. Delius, however, wanted to study music, and though his father did not approve of music as a profession, he did not discourage music-making as a pastime; thus, Delius was allowed to study the violin and the piano. To his father's dismay, he also spent much of his youth sneaking away from school to attend concerts and opera performances. When he completed school, he went to work for his father in the family business.

In 1884, Delius left England for Florida, where he worked on a plantation as an orange grower. While in Florida, he began studying music with Thomas Ward, a musician and teacher from Jacksonville. Delius proved to be a failure as an orange grower, and began supporting himself as a musician. In 1886, his father arranged for him to spend a year and a half studying music in Germany at the Leipzig Conservatory. Though Delius would later insist that he learned very little of importance during his stay in Leipzig, it was there that he met Grieg, with whom he forged a lifelong friendship. Grieg convinced Delius' father to allow the young man to become a composer, and Delius, with the support of his formerly reluctant father, soon moved to Paris and began living the life of an artist.

Once in Paris, Delius started composing in earnest, and toward the end of the 19th century had already completed two operas, Irmelin and The Magic Fountain. In the first decade of the 20th century, he married the painter Jelka Rosen and produced a number of important works, including the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, the large-scale choral works Appalachia and A Mass of Life (based on the writings of Nietzsche), a piano concerto, and a number of songs and chamber pieces. The rhapsody Brigg Fair (1907) and the tone poem On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring (1912) are perennial favorites on orchestra programs. His music was well received throughout Europe, and Delius was quite successful up until World War I, when he was forced to leave France for England. Despite his renown in continental Europe, he was virtually unknown in his native country, and his stay there was marred by financial difficulties.

After the war, Delius returned to France, where the syphilis he had contracted in Florida gradually caused him to become paralyzed and blind. Ironically, as he became increasingly infirm, his fame began to spread. This was due in large part to the efforts of English composer Sir Thomas Beecham, who championed Delius' music and organized a Delius Festival in 1929. Though terribly ill, Delius nonetheless still wanted to compose, and in 1928 he enlisted the services of English musician Eric Fenby, to whom he dictated music (Fenby would later write a book about Delius). Toward the end of his life, Delius was made Companion of Honor by King George V of England, and was awarded an honorary degree in music by Oxford University. Before his death, Delius was able to hear his music over the radio and on record, but these accomplishments paled before the terrible deterioration of his health, and he died in seclusion in Grez-sur-Loing, France, in 1934. ~ Alexander Carpenter

Based in Belfast, the Ulster Orchestra performs across Northern Ireland and beyond, including in the Republic of Ireland. The only professional symphony orchestra in Northern Ireland, the group has a large recording catalog, comprising more than 40 albums as of the early 2020s.

The Ulster Orchestra was founded in 1966 by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Its immediate predecessor was the semi-professional City of Belfast Symphony Orchestra, which was disbanded at that time. The orchestra's first conductor was Maurice Miles, who served for a single year; he was replaced by Sergiu Comissiona, who conducted the orchestra from 1967 to 1969 and was the first of its many conductors to hail from beyond Northern Ireland and beyond Britain. Comissiona was succeeded by Edgar Cosma, Alun Francis, and Bryden Thomson; the latter oversaw a substantial expansion of the group as the BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra disbanded in 1981, and many of its players moved to the Ulster Orchestra. The group now has 63 full-time players, and despite some funding crises, it has remained stable thanks to support from the Arts Council and the city of Belfast. Concerts are held mostly at Ulster Hall and Waterfront Hall in Belfast. In 1990, the orchestra released the album Shaun Davey: The Relief of Derry Symphony on the Tara label. The following year, the group began a long association with the Chandos label, issuing Stanford: Irish Rhapsodies, Clarinet Concerto.

The Ulster Orchestra has had many music directors, typically retaining them for periods of just a few years. Thomson's successors included Vernon Handley (1985-1989), who was later named conductor laureate, Yan Pascal Tortelier (1989-1992), En Shao (1992-1995), JoAnn Falletta (2011-2014), the group's first female and first American conductor, and Daniele Rustioni (2019-). The orchestra has a strong commitment to contemporary music and has employed Brian Irvine and Ian Wilson as Associate Composers. The Ulster Orchestra is often heard live on the BBC 3 network and is noted for its educational and outreach programs in the Belfast community. The group's recordings are notable for their variety, extending from crossover releases of classical favorites to thorny contemporary works. The orchestra has made numerous recordings for Chandos, Naxos, Hyperion (where it has been heard on several installments of the label's Classical Piano Concerto and Romantic Piano Concerto series), and Somm, where it was heard on a 2022 recording of Kurt Weill's little-recorded Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 2. ~ James Manheim

John Ireland was a conservative British composer whose music developed from a style that looked backward and forward toward Beethoven, Brahms, and other Classical and Romantic influences towards a post-Romantic manner, rich in lyricism, but having absorbed Impressionist and Neo-Classical elements. He is best known for his chamber music, solo piano compositions, and his songs. Yet, even in these genres, he was not consistent. In the orchestral realm he composed relatively few works, though several were of high quality, including the Piano Concerto in E flat and A London Overture. Ireland wrote not a single symphony or opera, and produced a single cantata, These Things Shall Be, a work which he came to dislike. In the end, Ireland must be assessed an important composer, who at his best could stand with his countrymen and contemporaries Vaughan Williams and Walton.

John Ireland was born near Manchester. As a youth he exhibited musical talent early, despite his parents' involvement in the literary world. They had many friends who were writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. This literary connection would surface later in many of Ireland's songs, many being settings of poems by Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, John Masefield, Christina Rosetti, and other English poets. At the age of fourteen he entered the Royal College of Music and shortly afterward suffered the loss of both parents. At the RCM he studied piano (with Frederick Cliffe), organ, and composition. In the latter realm, his teacher was the difficult but thorough Stanford, with whom he began study in 1897.

Ireland wrote a fair number of compositions during his student years, but later destroyed most of them. One work of significance from this period that has survived, though, was the Sextet for Clarinet, Horn and String Quartet (1898). After Ireland ended his studies with Stanford in 1901, he worked as an organist and choir director. He served in that dual capacity at St. Luke's Church in Chelsea, beginning in 1904, holding the post until 1926.

Ireland's Phantasie Trio (1906) and his Violin Sonata No. 1 (1908-1909) helped establish his reputation. The influence of Impressionism was taking hold of him in the early part of the new century, though largely affecting his piano works. Ireland composed his orchestral piece, The Forgotten Rite, in 1913, a work that reflected his interest in pagan mysticism. In the period 1915-1917 he produced his Violin Sonata No. 2, regarded by many as among the greatest chamber works to emerge from wartime England.

Ireland took a faculty post in composition at the RCM in 1923. Over the years, his students there would include Britten, Searle, and Moeran. In 1927, the composer married, but only briefly, the ceremony subsequently being annulled and thus swiftly ending a most unpleasant episode in his personal life.

Ireland left the RCM in 1939, but continued composing, turning out works like the brilliant Fantasy-Sonata for clarinet and piano in 1943. After he composed the film score for The Overlanders in the years 1946-1947, however, he wrote nothing more. It has been said that Ireland led a relatively uneventful life, landing no conducting post, traveling very little, never startling his audiences with a bold new composition, or exhibiting outrageous personal behavior. He was a self-critical, introspective man, haunted by memories of a sad childhood. He spent the latter part of his retirement in Rock Mill, Sussex, where he purchased a converted wind mill in 1953, where he died nine years later.