Born in London in 1970, Nicolas Hodges trained as a pianist at Winchester College and the University of Cambridge with Robert Bottone, Susan Bradshaw, and Sulamita Aronovsky; he also studied composition with Michael Finnissy and Robin Holloway. His repertoire focuses on contemporary music, which he performs with such orchestras as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with Marin Alsop, Daniel Barenboim, Susanna Mälkki, Jonathan Nott, François-Xavier Roth, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, and Leonard Slatkin on the podium. Nicolas Hodges is a regular guest at major festivals, including the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Salzburg Festival, the Tanglewood Festival, Ars Musica Brussels, Wien Modern, the BBC Proms, and the Tage für Neue Musik in Zurich. As a chamber musician, he has been a member of Trio Accanto since 2013 and performs with the Arditti Quartet, cellist Adrian Brendel, and percussionist Colin Currie. Time and again, renowned composers have written new works for Hodges: Elliott Carter’s piano concerto Dialogues (2004), Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days (2008), and Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Gigue Machine (2011) and Variations from the Golden Mountain (2014) were all created for him. He enjoys a close relationship with this summer’s composer-in-residence Rebecca Saunders, who has written several works for Hodges, such as the double concerto miniata, Choler for two pianos, the trio That Time, the solo pieces crimson and Shadow, and the piano concerto to an utterance, which is receiving its world premiere this evening. Since 2005, Nicolas Hodges has been professor of piano at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart; additionally, he is a lecturer at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music.
Lucerne Festival debut on 16 August 2002 with the Basel Sinfonietta under Peter Rundel in a program including Xenakis’s Keqrops.
July 2021