George Rowley

Pianist George Rowley is a rising performer and educator in his native West Midlands region. He released his debut album on the Naxos label in 2023. Rowley grew up in Kidderminster, near Birmingham, and began his piano studies there at age seven. At nine, he entered a national music festival in Bristol, England, taking home first prize. Rowley studied at Birmingham's Junior Conservatoire with Magdalena Nasidlak, going on to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in 2011. He earned his bachelor's degree there, with first-class honors, in 2015 and spent a semester at the Hannover Hochschule für Music before entering the master's program in piano performance at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, earning his degree with distinction in 2018. Important teachers for Rowley were Roger Owens and Mark Bebbington, and he took master classes from Freddy Kempf, Steven Osborne, Natalia Trull, and Peter Donohoe, among others. He rounded out his education with a year's study at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest in 2018 and 2019. He placed highly in various competitions, including the Brighton and Hove Concerto Competition, the Intercollegiate Piano Competition of the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe, and the Sir Ian Stoutzker Prize competition. As early as 2011, Rowley began making solo appearances around Britain. He has appeared at the Winchester Festival, Holywell Music Room, and the Liddell Concert Series, among other venues. His career as an educator began in 2015 at the GEMS Sherfield School in Sherfield-on-Loddon, and he spent a year as a piano tutor at Severn Arts. Since 2019, he has been on the faculty at his alma mater, the Junior Department of the Birmingham Conservatoire, and he has also taught at the Cheltenham Ladies' College. Rowley released his debut album, featuring piano works by Ivor Gurney, on the Naxos label in 2023.
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