Clare Hammond, piano
Clare Hammond is recognised for her imaginative playing, visionary programming, and communicative performance style. She won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award in 2016.
In 2024, she debuted at the BBC Proms, Konzerthaus Berlin, and Salle Bourgie in Montreal, and returned to the Wigmore Hall, London’s National Gallery, and Raritäten der Klaviermusik in Husum. She recorded a disc of concertos by Britten, Tippett and Walton with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and George Vass, performed Rachmaninov with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Tom Fetherstonhaugh, and Hesketh with the Ulster Orchestra and Anna Rakitina. She gave the second ever performance of the recently revived Fantasia by Andrzej Panufnik, more than sixty years after its premiere, with the Filharmonia Poznańska and Łukasz Borowicz.
Contemporary music is at the core of her work. She has given over 50 world premieres, including those of major works by Arlene Sierra, Robert Saxton, Jeffrey Mumford and Michael Berkeley, and her discography includes world premiere recordings of over twenty works. In 2019, she gave the world premiere of Kenneth Hesketh’s Uncoiling the River with Martyn Brabbins and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and a further performance with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Vasily Petrenko. In 2022, she premiered Graham Fitkin’s new piano quartet with Fitkin, Ruth Wall and Kathryn Stott at the Aldeburgh Festival, and opened the Southbank Centre’s 22/23 season at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the work. In 2025 she premiered a new concerto by Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
She has recorded six discs for BIS, most recently releasing an album of Etudes by visionary French composer Hélène de Montgeroult, launched in a special concert at London’s National Gallery. It featured extensively on BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week and Essential Classics and was selected as Editor’s Choice in Gramophone. Reviewers noted the historical importance of the Etudes and the ideal match with Hammond’s virtuosic and lyrical abilities. She previously recorded a disc of 20th– and 21st-century variations which received extensive critical approval, and a disc of etudes by Unsuk Chin, Nikolai Kapustin, Sergei Lyapunov and Karol Szymanowski which won her an Opus d’Or from Opus HD magazine and 5 diapasons from Diapason. Youth, an album of music written for her by Edmund Finnis won an Edison Klassiek Award and Presto Classical’s ‘EP of the Year’ Award in 2024.
Community engagement forms an increasingly important part of her work. She recently founded the Gloucestershire Piano Trust to support her ongoing work in schools and prisons, which reaches around 4,000 schoolchildren and 300 prisoners each year.
This season, she makes her debut at the Royal Albert Hall performing Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Christopher Warren-Green and premieres a new concerto by George Stevenson with the Britten Sinfonia. Clare will record repertoire by Ravel, Tailleferre, Bonis, Barraine and Chaminade for BIS Records.
She completed a BA at Cambridge University, where she obtained a double first in music, and undertook postgraduate study with Ronan O’Hora at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and with Professor Rhian Samuel at City University London. She completed a doctorate on 20th-century left-hand piano concertos in 2012. In 2014 Clare was paired with French pianist Anne Queffélec on the Philip Langridge Mentoring Scheme run by the RPS.
