Conference Participants

Malcolm Bilson has been in the forefront of the period instrument movement for over thirty years.  Pianist of the Cornell Music Department since 1968, in the early 1970s he began his pioneering activity as a performer of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on late 18th and early 19th century pianos.  Bilson’s work 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. He 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, the solo Piano Sonatas and the Piano-Violin Sonatas with Sergiu Luca.  He has also recorded all the Piano-Cello Sonatas of Beethoven with Anner Bylsma, and his traversal of the Schubert Piano sonatas on period pianos (including the so-called incomplete sonatas) was completed in 2003.  A disc of Schubert’s four-hand music was done with Robert Levin in November, 1997, and in 2005 a single CD of Haydn Sonatas appeared.

In addition to an extensive career as a soloist and chamber player, Bilson has toured with the English Baroque Soloists with John Eliot Gardiner, the Academy of Ancient Music with Christopher Hogwood, the Philharmonia Baroque under Nicholas McGegan, Tafelmusik of Toronto, Concerto Köln and other early and modern instrument orchestras around the world.

In the fall of 1994 Bilson and six of his former artist-pupils from Cornell’s DMA program in Historical Performance Practice presented the 32 Piano Sonatas of Beethoven in New 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.”  In 1996 the group recorded the series for the Claves label; it garnered over 50 very positive reviews and has recently been reissued.

Bilson teaches undergraduate piano in addition to directing the Graduate Program in 18th Century Historical Performance Practice for Keyboards.  He is also Adjunct Professor at the Eastman School of Music.  He gives annual summer fortepiano workshops at various locations in the United States and Europe, as well as master classes and lectures (generally in conjunction with solo performances) around the world.  In 1991 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Bard College, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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