Catherine Duncan is a Scottish pianist and violinist currently based in London. She is active both as a soloist and chamber musician and gives regular performances throughout the UK, and is the founder and artistic director of the Three Rivers Festival. She is passionate about music as an instrument of dialogue and about classical performance as a powerful means of bringing people together. Catherine loves to curate programmes which allow works to be heard with a fresh perspective and which draw upon little explored links between composers.
As a semi-finalist of the BBC Scotland Young Classical Competition she featured on BBC Radio Scotland playing Villa-Lobos and Ginastera. She has given solo recitals in Rome, Dunblane and in Birmingham performing a programme which included solo works by Bach and Rachmaninov, and culminated in Rachmaninov’s Transcription of Bach’s Violin Partita in E major.
Catherine is currently completing her Artist Masters at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where she has received a scholarship to undertake an Artist Diploma in Piano Accompaniment, continuing her studies with Carole Presland. Catherine is very grateful to Help Musicians for awarding her the Henry Richardson award this year, and to the Sir James Caird Travelling Scholarships Trust for their generous support towards her studies. Before moving to London, Catherine completed her undergraduate studies with Alasdair Beatson at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire where she was supported by the Malcolm Bullock Memorial Trust Award. There, she was awarded the Marjorie Hazlehurst Piano Award, given to a student “whose Major Project demonstrates the greatest imagination, enterprise and highest level of performance.” This project entailed Catherine performing Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 15 in an arrangement for piano and string quintet by Vincenz Lachner with colleagues from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.
Before moving to Birmingham, Catherine studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Junior Department with Claire Haslin. During these formative years she also studied violin with Kathleen Simans. Her experience at the Junior Conservatoire deeply impacted her, fostering a love not only of music and performance but of the intrinsic value of musical connection. This instilled in her a strong desire to give what she had received back to the next generation and fulled her passion for music education, a love nurtured and developed during her time as a lead ambassador for the Benedetti Foundation.
