Huw Watkins
Composer/Piano

Huw Watkins was born in South Wales in 1976. He studied piano with Peter Lawson and Peter Pettinger and composition with Robin Holloway, Alexander Goehr and Julian Anderson. In 2001 he was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music which he held for two years. He is now a professor of composition at the RCM.

Huw Watkins is in great demand both as composer and pianist. The Independent on Sunday described him as 'a pianist of alert intelligence and a composer with something to say' following his 1999 Park Lane Group Young Artists Concert at London's Purcell Room. In March 2000 he gave the London premiere of his Violin Sonata at Wigmore Hall with the violinist Daniel Bell. In the same month he was soloist in Messiaen's Sept Haikai with the Northern Sinfonia at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. In May 2002 he gave the world premiere of a new work for solo piano by Alexander Goehr. He is regularly heard on Radio Three, both as a soloist and with artists such as Daniel Hope, Nicholas Daniel and Alexandra Wood. He has recorded Thomas Adès' song cycle The Lover in Winter with the countertenor Robin Blaze for EMI Classics.

Huw is also a composer of note. His work has been performed by numerous ensembles both at home and abroad including the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, the Nash Ensemble and the London Symphony Orchestra.