John Ogdon
Biographie John Ogdon
John Ogdon
Born in Nottinghamshire on January 27, 1937 John Andrew Howard Ogdon studied at the Royal Northern College of Music under Richard Hall, where he and fellow students such as conductor Elgar Horwarth and composers Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davis founded the influential group New Music Manchester. After college he studied piano with Gordon Green, Dennis Matthews, Dame Myra Hess and the noted Busoni pupil Egon Petri, who declared Ogdon his most talented pupil. After winning first prize in the 1961 London Liszt Competition, Ogdon’s international reputation took off in the aftermath of his victory in the 1962 Moscow International Tchaikovsky Competition, sharing first prize with Vladimir Ashkenazy. Gifted with a huge memory and an uncanny sight-reading ability, Ogdon amassed a large and diverse repertoire, much of which he recorded, including numerous works for piano duo with his wife Brenda Lucas.
While his career was curtailed by mental illness and a severe nervous breakdown in 1973, he eventually recovered to the point where he could resume concertizing and recording until his sudden death from pneumonia on August 1, 1989. During his final decade Ogdon continued to travel piano music’s lesser known paths, culminating with the first studio recording of Sorabji’s complex, five-hour-long Opus Clavicembalisticum. Ogdon also composed more than 200 works, including four operas, two piano concertos, two large orchestral pieces, piano and chamber music and more than fifty solo piano transcriptions based on composers ranging from Palestrina to Cole Porter.
