Howard Shelley’s mother was a trained cellist and it was she who gave him his first piano lessons. He then learnt with Vera Yelverton at primary school. Shelley was a precociously gifted child who by the age of ten had already appeared on a television programme from Glasgow, All Your Own, on which he played works by Chopin and Bach. The following year he made his debut in the recital room of the Royal Festival Hall in London, playing a piano concerto by Haydn. From the age of thirteen Shelley studied with Harold Craxton and at sixteen was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied with Kendall Taylor, Ilona Kabós and Lamar Crowson and won the Chappell Gold Medal. At twenty-one Shelley made his adult solo debut at the Wigmore Hall in London playing a large programme that included a sonata by Clementi, Beethoven’s ‘Les Adieux’ Sonata Op. 81a, Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy D. 760, Debussy’s Images Book 2, Busoni’s Carmen Fantasy and Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 5 Op. 53. The following year Shelley made his debut at the Proms playing a movement of Liszt’s Hexameron. He also replaced Lamar Crowson as pianist with the Melos Ensemble at this time.

To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Rachmaninov’s death in 1983, Shelley performed the complete solo piano music in five recitals at the Wigmore Hall in London, all broadcast by the BBC. He has performed with many orchestras under such conductors as Sir Adrian Boult, Pierre Boulez, Sir Charles Groves, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Kurt Sanderling, and Mariss Jansons. Shelley’s repertoire is wide, from Mozart and Haydn to contemporary works, and he also plays a great deal of British music by composers such as Michael Tippett, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Howard Ferguson, Herbert Howells and William Alwyn. Peter Dickinson, Brian Chapple and Edward Cowie have written piano concertos specifically for him. Shelley has performed throughout Europe, Canada, the United States, Scandinavia, Hong Kong, Russia and Australia.

At the age of thirty-five Shelley made his debut as a conductor and has since conducted a great many orchestras including the London Symphony, Bournemouth Symphony, Royal Philharmonic and Philharmonia. Shelley has worked closely with the London Mozart Players in a relationship of over twenty years and from 2000 to 2003 was music director and principal conductor of the Uppsala Chamber Orchestra in Sweden, where he continues to guest-conduct. Shelley held a one-year appointment in 1991 as principal guest conductor of the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra, Brisbane.

As a pianist, Shelley’s style is clear and proportioned. He is straightforward in Chopin and Schumann and sounds more involved in works by lesser-known composers such as Cramer and Moscheles. It is in composers such as these that Shelley brings an understanding and a will to share in the pure joy of the music.

Shelley has made more than eighty-five discs. For Hyperion he has recorded the complete solo piano music of Rachmaninov and has appeared in their Romantic Piano Concerto Series as conductor/ soloist of concertos by Moscheles and Herz. Of the Rachmaninov cycle James Methuen-Campbell wrote in The Gramophone, ‘Shelley has a wonderful feeling for the Rachmaninov sound-world and for the extraordinary subtlety of the composer’s polyphonic writing’, whilst Joan Chissell described him as a ‘masterful, intense and stylish Rachmaninov player’. For Chandos he has made more than fifty recordings, including the complete works for piano and orchestra by Rachmaninov with the Scottish National Orchestra and Bryden Thomson and six volumes in a Mozart concerto cycle with the London Mozart Players, as well as piano concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Hummel, Cramer, Korngold, Balakirev, Liapunov, Dohnányi, Alwyn, Vaughan Williams, Scott, Tippett, and Howells. He also appears on disc in a wide variety of music by Lennox Berkeley, Frank Bridge, Carl Reineke, Robert Casadesus, Cyril Scott, Edmund Rubbra and Karol Szymanowski as both soloist and, in some cases including the Casadesus and Reineke discs, also as conductor.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).