Sholto Kynoch is a sought-after pianist who specialises in chamber music and song accompaniment. In addition to a busy performance schedule and a fast-growing discography, he is the founder and director of the Oxford Lieder Festival, the UK’s most renowned song festival, which recently won a prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Award.
In recent years he has appeared at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Palau de la Música in Barcelona, the Berliner Konzerthaus, the Victoria Concert Hall in Singapore, the Opéra de Lille, St John’s Smith Square, Bridgewater Hall, the Purcell Room and many other venues and Festivals around the UK and in Austria, Colombia, Germany, Sweden and Romania. He has performed with singers including Sophie Daneman, Robert Holl, James Gilchrist, Dietrich Henschel, Katarina Karnéus, Wolfgang Holzmair, Jonathan Lemalu, Stephan Loges, Daniel Norman, Joan Rodgers, Kate Royal, Mark Stone, Birgid Steinberger, Anna Stéphany, Kitty Whately and Roderick Williams, amongst many others.
Recording projects include an ongoing series of the complete songs of Hugo Wolf, recorded live at the Oxford Lieder Festival. Gramophone Magazine wrote of the first volume: “The team of four singers is first-rate, responsive in every way, and if anything even more remarkable is the work of their pianist, Sholto Kynoch, displaying an exceptional expressive range, not only ideally agile but with the most subtle range of tone and dynamic.” The eight volumes released so far, of a projected eleven, have been similarly acclaimed. He is also recording the complete songs of John Ireland and Havergal Brian with baritone Mark Stone, with whom he appears regularly in recital. Other CDs include Beethoven trios with the Phoenix Piano Trio and discs of Schumann and Schubert Lieder.
Sholto is the pianist of the Phoenix Piano Trio, with violinist Jonathan Stone and cellist Christian Elliott. The Trio has given several recitals at Wigmore Hall, has been in residence at the Happy Days Festival in Enniskillen, N. Ireland,and has performed at many venues and Festivals including the Ryedale and Leicester festivals, and the London Chamber Music Society at Kings Place.
From November 2013 to January 2014, Sholto curated a series of concerts and lecture-recitals at the National Gallery as part of their exhibition of Viennese portraiture; “Facing the Modern”. In 2015 he curated two lecture-recitals at the British Museum for their “Germany” exhibition, and in 2016 he returned to the National Gallery for their “Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art”.
Sholto read Music at Worcester College, Oxford, and studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He was awarded scholarships to all three institutions and upon graduation from the GSMD was appointed a Junior Fellow there. His teachers included Michael Dussek, Graham Johnson, Vanessa Latarche, Malcolm Martineau and Ronan O’Hora. Following a Leverhulme-funded residency, he was appointed an Honorary Research Fellow of Bangor University in 2009. In 2010, Sholto was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music.
