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Steven Devine

Keyboardist and conductor Steven Devine has been a keyboard player for London Baroque, the Classical Opera Company, the Gonzaga Band, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and other period performance groups, both instrumental and operatic. A curator at a museum of historical keyboard instruments, he has played and recorded an unusually wide variety of keyboard repertory from the Renaissance to the 20th century, and he remains active as a conductor. Devine was born in England's Yorkshire region in 1974. His family members were not professional musicians but deeply enjoyed music; his paternal grandmother was a Methodist church organist who continued to play beyond her 100th birthday. Devine showed an interest in music and began lessons when he was six. His piano teacher encouraged him to apply to the competitive Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, and he was admitted. For several years, he did well, but in his mid-teens, he experienced a crisis in which he felt he could not measure up to other students and expressed an interest in playing soccer (football) instead. To encourage him not to give up, teachers diverted him to the harpsichord, which he took to strongly. He studied with David Francis. After studies at St. Peter's College, Oxford, he met major figures in the English early music movement, including sopranos Emma Kirkby and Evelyn Tubb, and lutenist Anthony Rooley, at the historic Dartington Hall venue; there, he gained practical skills in instrument tuning and repair, as well as conducting. He also began to work during this period at the Finchcocks Collection of historical keyboard instruments. From 2002 to 2010, Devine was the director of the historically oriented company Opera Restor'd. He continued to play the piano and made his recording debut on that instrument in 2007, backing mandolinist Alison Stephens on a Naxos recording of works by Raffaele Calace. Devine has successfully combined careers as a conductor and a keyboardist. In the former capacity, he has led a variety of groups, including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, London Baroque, and groups beyond Britain, such as Trondheim Barokk in Norway and the Arion Baroque Ensemble in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He also led groups that were not historically oriented, such as the Norwegian Wind Ensemble, which he directed from 2016 to 2018, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He is an experienced opera conductor whose repertory includes works by Purcell, Cavalli, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, as well as such rarer composers as Baldassare Galuppi, Antonio Salieri, and Domenico Cimarosa. In 2009, he recorded Purcell's Dido & Aeneas with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, featuring Sarah Connolly in the lead role. Devine is the principal keyboard player with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Gonzaga Band, and The Mozartists, and is in demand as a continuo player with many other groups. Devine has also recorded extensively as a keyboardist, recording Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, on the harpsichord for the Chandos label in 2011 and Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in two volumes in 2019 and 2020. Devine remained active through the COVID-19 pandemic, releasing the album Beyond Beethoven: Ries, Straup, Starke, Thürner on fortepiano on Resonus Classics in 2021. He returned on that label in 2023 as a combined keyboardist and director, leading the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in a recording of Bach harpsichord concertos that included his own reconstruction of the fragmentary Keyboard Concerto in D minor, BWV 1059.
© James Manheim /TiVo
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Discography

40 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller

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