Peter Donohoe, the British pianist who won the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1982, has pursued a career as a concert pianist that has been marked by eclecticism across styles and periods. Born in Manchester on June 18, 1953, he studied violin, viola, clarinet and tuba at Chetham's School of Music and auditioned for the piano class at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where he was Derek Wyndham's youngest pupil. After graduating in 1975 with a degree in piano and percussion, having studied with Alexander Goehr at Leeds University, Peter Donohoe was hired as percussionist by the BBC Symphonic Orchestra, among other collaborations with English orchestras. Nevertheless, he never abandoned the piano, continuing his training with Yvonne Loriod and Olivier Messiaen in Paris, Vlado Perlemuter and Charles Rosen at the Royal Northern College of Music and Zoltan Kocsis in Budapest. This solid training prepared the pianist for the 1982 Moscow Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, where he won second prize. He went on to develop his Russian repertoire with recordings of Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky for EMI in the 1980s. From 1984 to 1987, Peter Donohoe was appointed conductor of the Northern Chamber Orchestra, before founding The Orchestra of the Mill (1987-1993). His seminal encounter with Simon Rattle in 1974 led to a recording of works by Messiaen in 1987 and Bartók's three piano concertos with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (1993), followed by further collaborations. Numerous recordings followed, including major works by Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn and the complete Mozart piano sonatas in six volumes (2018-2023), as well as albums devoted to little-known British composers such as Litolff, Volans, Walton, Finzi, Bliss, Alwyn, Tippett, Harty and Alan Bush, not forgetting chamber music by Edward Elgar. He also records the ten piano sonatas by Prokofiev and Scriabin, Shostakovich's 24 Preludes & Fugues (2017), and in 2024, a volume of Albéniz's twoIberia books and the first book of Granados' Goyescas.
