Malcolm Bilson

Malcolm Bilson began his pioneering activity in the early 1970s as a performer of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on late 18th- and early 19th-century pianos. Since then he has proven to be a key contributor to the restoration of the fortepiano to the concert stage and to fresh recordings of the "mainstream" repertory.

Bilson has recorded the three most important complete cycles of works for piano by Mozart: the piano concertos with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists for Deutsche Grammophon Archiv, the piano-violin Sonatas with Sergiu Luca for Nonesuch records, and the solo piano sonatas for Hungaroton. His traversal on period pianos of the Schubert piano sonatas (including the so-called incomplete sonatas), likewise on Hungaroton, was completed in 2003.  In 2005 a single CD of Haydn sonatas appeared on the Claves label, and in 2008 his first recording on an English piano was released on Bridge Records with works of Dussek, Cramer and Haydn.
  
Bilson, a member of the Cornell Music Faculty since 1968, is also Adjunct Professor at the Eastman School of Music and more recently on the Early Music Faculty of the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, in charge of Keyboard Studies. He gives annual summer fortepiano workshops at various locations in the United States and Europe, as well as master classes and lectures around the world.

In the fall of 1994 Bilson and six of his former artist-pupils from Cornell's D.M.A. program in Historical Performance Practice presented the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven in New York City, the first time ever that these works had been given as a cycle on period instruments. The New York Times said that "what emerged in these performances was an unusually clear sense of how revolutionary these works must have sounded in their time." The recording of this series for Claves Records garnered over fifty very positive reviews and has recently been reissued.

An educational video entitled Knowing the Score was released in 2005, in which Bilson discusses the question: “Do we really know how to read the notation of the so-called 'classical' masters?” Called “deep and thought-provoking,” “brilliant” and “a must-see for everyone” (cf. www.knowingthescore.com), it has been seen in conservatories all over the world and translated into several languages.  A second video, Performing the Score, dealing with various types of pianos in chamber music settings, is currently in production to be released in the summer of 2011.

Malcolm Bilson is a member of the American National Academy of Arts and Sciences, has an honorary doctorate from Bard College and is the recipient of the 2006 James Smithson Bicentennial Medal.