Neil Georgeson is a pianist, writer and composer from the Shetland Islands and based in London. He appears regularly and widely as a solo pianist and chamber musician, across the world. He has performed as a soloist at the Wigmore Hall, The Royal Festival Hall, King's Place, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the Barbican in London, St David's Hall in Cardiff, the Colston Hall in Bristol and for her late Majesty the Queen in Edinburgh. Festival appearances include Vienna Modern (Austria), Darmstadt (Germany), Gaudeamus (Netherlands), Transit (Belgium), Nordic Music Days (Sweden and UK), and Glastonbury (UK). He has worked with a great many illustrious composers on their music such as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Øyvind Torvund, Martin Bresnick, Errolyn Wallen, Chaya Czernowin, Clara Iannotta and Jonathan Harvey. He has performed with the Riot Ensemble, the London Chamber Orchestra, the London Contemporary Orchestra, squib-box and the Ossian Ensemble. For Piano Circus, which he joined in 2015, he has arranged and composed work for six pianos, including for a recent tour of South Korea.
He enjoyed a prize-winning academic career on scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying piano solo performance. He completed a Masters degree with a highly-acclaimed thesis on the role of the performer in classical music, which became an exemplar dissertation for Masters students, then became a Fellow at the Academy working with composers on new music.
Neil has written three opera libretti which were all premiered in London – “KETTLEHEAD” for Darren Bloom, “Angela” for Corin Buckeridge, which won the Best Opera Award in the Off West End awards, and “Njogel” for James Young, “put together with exceptional care and skill, and full of wit and originality, a unique, highly textured lyric voice” (bachtrack). With James Young he also created the improvised music-theatre show Event001.