VIRTUOSIC: meet the Wigan-born pianist who's wowing audiences around the world

A glance at his 2024 diary sees him whizzing around the world to Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, the UK and Australia, performing with two different trios, accompanying soloists, giving solo recitals, performing with orchestras, recording CDs and teaching at Freiburg University of Music in Germany, a country that has been home for most of his adult life.

All this when he has a wife Hwa-Won, who is herself a professional violinist with her own busy schedule, and three children aged 11 and under. It was a wonder he had time for his phone call to Wigan Today, but he had to stop in because the plumber was coming to fix the boiler!

And of course there are times for the mundanities of life, even for someone with an international reputation in the classical music world, whether it be home maintenance or raising a young family in Stuttgart.

But the 42-year-old lives and breathes music, with part of the pleasure being that he never stops learning.

It all started when, shortly before his seventh birthday, Nicholas began piano lessons with Brenda Simpson in Shevington.

The youngster, who lived in nearby Shevington Moor, soon began to demonstrate that he had exceptional talent and it soon landed him a place at the junior school of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester where he studied piano with the legendary teacher John Wilson.

Parallel to this he continued other academic studies first at Orrell St Peter’s High and then Runshaw College, which, Nicholas says, had an excellent music department.

He was organ scholar at Clare College, Cambridge, and after graduating from university went to study at Hanover’s Music Conservatory (Nicholas’s mum is German so he has always been bilingual), where he would eventually take up a teaching post, and gained further experience in Berlin and Cologne.

Amidst all this rich education there were competition wins and in 2000 he reached the piano final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year.

While he does give solo recitals and performs concertos with orchestras, it is as a chamber music play and accompanist that he is perhaps best known.

His now eight-year membership of the Trio Gaspard has been one of the most prosperous musical relationships of his career so far.

And they are spending a good deal of time in Britain at the moment having been awarded a residency at the prestigious Wigmore Hall in London this season.

They perform 35 to 40 concerts together a year, a disc of Russian music was one an “editor’s choice” in Gramophone magazine and they are currently on a large-scale project with the award-winning label Chandos to record all of Haydn’s 40-plus trios.

Nicholas has an even longer association with the Belli-Fischer-Rimmer Trio, comprising the uncommon combination of trombone, percussion and piano which has been delighting audiences with enterprising repertoire and rare arrangements since 2007.

Of his ensembles, Nicholas says: “I’ve long gravitated towards performing in small groups and there is quite a contrast between these two.

"With the Belli-Fischer-Rimmer Trio its an ensemble with almost limitless possibilities. Over the last few years we’ve done a sequence involving Tom Waits arrangements along with Schubert and Kurt Weill. We are hoping we can record that soon. We are starting to use electronics and a synthesiser too.

"Our concerts are quite sporadic and I spend a lot more time in the Trio Gaspard, and when we play together there is a feeling that it’s really right.

"We strive not just to play well together and be precise but also to play in the same spirit, and search for freedom of expression at the same time which is a bit of a conundrum.

"We have really gelled together well but we are still developing. It’s a nice mixture of personalities.”

The trio have found in the veteran Hungarian piano teacher Ferenc Rados a “kind of mentor who has really influenced us,” said Nicholas.

Another close musical association Nicholas has had is with the violinist Tianwa Yang and together they have recorded for the Naxos label, the latest being of “enfant terrible” George Antheil’s violin sonatas.

And slotted inbetween all these concerts and recordings is Nicholas’s teaching of piano and collaborative courses at Freiburg University.

It makes you wonder how he has time for family.

"We have to work our schedules out very carefully,” says Nicholas. Usually there is either Hwa-Won or me at home looking after the children while the other is out. On occasions we have to call on the services of my parents-in-law, and my parents were over babysitting the other week too but we try not to make a habit of it.

And do we have another Kanneh-Mason family in the offing where every family member seems to be a professional performer?

Nicholas said: “It is our intention that the boys have a sense of of what it is like to make music but that’s as far as we go. If, later in life, they want to go off and do something else, that’s absolutely fine.”

The two older boys – Nathan, 11, and nine-year-old Magnus – are learning instruments: the former on the violin, the latter on both piano and French horn. At two, it’s a little early for their youngest, Quentin, to be showing an interest beyond enjoying Sing a Song of Sixpence and Bernstein’s Candide Overture!

Nicholas said: “We’ve got a good work-life balance although sometimes there’s a bit of blurring between where one stops and the other begins. For instance we recently did a little benefit concert at the school round the corner which was great fun.

"But then music is always great fun and I am so glad I’ve been able to make a career out of it.”