Pianist and conductor Ian Hobson— called “powerful and persuasive” by The New York Times— is recognized internationally for his command of an extraordinarily comprehensive repertoire, his consummate performances of the Romantic masters, his deft and idiomatic readings of neglected piano music old and new, and his assured conducting from both the piano and the podium.

 

In addition to being a celebrated performer, Mr. Hobson is a dedicated scholar and educator who has pioneered renewed interest in the music of such lesser known masters as Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Hummel. He has also been an effective advocate of works written expressly for him by a number of today’s noted composers, including Benjamin Lees, John Gardner, David Liptak, Alan Ridout, and Yehudi Wyner.

 

This season Mr. Hobson will present a six-concert series at New York’s downtown venue SubCulture, from November to April, featuring works by Ravel and Debussy.

 

In his most recent season, Mr. Hobson presented a six-concert series in New York City: Preludes, Etudes, and Variations – Downtown/Uptown focusing on outstanding examples of each genre by Chopin, Fauré, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and Szymanowski. The series also expanded the genres by presenting world premieres by Yehudi Wyner (Preludes), Robert Chumbley (Etudes), and Stephen Taylor (Variations). In an earlier season, Mr. Hobson performed the complete solo piano works and chamber music with piano of Johannes Brahms, entitled Johannes Brahms: Classical Inclinations in a Romantic Age. The New York Times’ Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim praised the opening performance in the series in her article “Ian Hobson, Powerful and Persuasive in First of Six Concerts”

 

With his powerful sound and clear-eyed command of multiple voices, Mr. Hobson offered a reading of the Opus 25 set that was varied and exciting. He also vividly characterized each of Rachmaninoff’s 10 Opus 23 Preludes, from the boozy impatience of the fifth to the noble singing voice of the concluding Largo.

 

Mr. Hobson offered as well a persuasive and evocative first performance of Stephen Taylor’s “Variations Ascending,” a kind of evolutionary history of the world in 10 chapters, built around a musical representation of a single gene.

(The New York Times, October 14, 2015)

 

Mr. Hobson continues his concerts as music director of the Sinfonia da Camera, a professional chamber orchestra affiliated with the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and College of Fine and Applied Arts of the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, where Mr. Hobson is the Swanlund Emeritus Professor of Music. Further recital and teaching engagements this season take Mr. Hobson throughout the United States and several times to South Korea, where he is a professor at the National University of Seoul.  Mr. Hobson will also conduct at the Carnegie Mellon University in January 2018.

 

An artist of prodigious energy and resource, having to date amassed a discography of some 60 releases, including the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven and Schumann and a complete edition of Brahms’s variations for piano, Mr. Hobson is also in the process of recording a complete edition – the most comprehensive to date – of the works of Frédéric Chopin. Volume 12 of the series was praised by Colin Clarke in Fanfare:

 

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