Biography
Sholto Kynoch is in demand as a chamber musician and song accompanist, regularly performing with many outstanding instrumentalists and singers.
Recent highlights have included performances at Wigmore Hall (with violinist Kaoru Yamada), the Berliner Konzerthaus (with soprano Olja Dakic), the Victoria Concert Hall in Singapore (with violinist Tee Khoon Tang), the St Endellion Festival, the Chichester Festivities, Cambridge Summer Music, the Perth Festival, the Brasov International Chamber Music Festival in Romania, the Chelsea Schubert Festival (with the Doric String Quartet) and a series of recitals in Sweden (with violist Ylvali Zilliacus).
He is the pianist of the recently-formed Phoenix Piano Trio, with violinist Jonathan Stone and cellist Marie Macleod. The trio will be performing the complete Beethoven trios in various venues in 2010.
Sholto is the founder and director of the Oxford Lieder Festival, where he has accompanied some fifty song recitals over the past eight years, working with singers including Kate Royal, James Gilchrist, Mark Stone, Jonathan Lemalu and Henry Herford. In 2008, he was privileged to play for Ian Partridge�s �Farewell� recital.
Sholto read Music at Worcester College, Oxford, and studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His teachers have included Michael Dussek, Graham Johnson, Malcolm Martineau, Ronan O'Hora and Vanessa Latarche.
Reviews
Ms Seara was accompanied by Sholto Kynoch, if 'accompanied' is the word: the piano parts were extraordinarily descriptive and atmospheric, and the two performers each moved back and forth between foreground and background.
Daily Information / Oxford Lieder recital with soprano Joana Seara
Kynoch's playing [in Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death] was gloriously manic, echoing the fractured unreality in the text... [He] showed what a good accompanist can achieve. In the Mussorgsky, his job was to match the singing. In Schumann's evocative preludes and postludes [Schumann, Liederkreis Op. 24], he provided the subtler commentary, gently pulling Stone back towards a more Lieder-like ethos. Singers and pianists are supposed to work together and support each other, and this was a very good example of their interaction. In the Duparc songs that followed, Kynoch's deft pedal deepened the colours to match Stone's dark timbre. It was a good example of pianist adapting to singer.
Seen and Heard / Oxford Lieder Festival recital with baritone Mark Stone
All played with conviction and consummate ease with their complicated textures… Sholto Kynoch's wonderful pianism added so much.
Perth Courier / Perth Festival of the Arts recital with Rowan Hellier
In Dalbavie's tribute to the artistry of Emanuel Ax, the piano's rhetoric – delivered with great authority by Sholto Kynoch – was drawn into a playful engagement with the wind instruments in a dialogue of textural exquisiteness reminiscent of Ravel's Introduction and Allegro.
Classical Source / BBC Proms Composer Portrait concert at the Royal Albert Hall
Giving their first recital in the Highlands, two superb musicians, Kaoru Yamada, violin, and Sholto Kynoch, piano, winners of the 2005 prestigious Tunnell Trust Award, began their programme with the Sonata in A major of Schubert. Here, both musicians immediately established a superb rapport and technical assurance in this most lyrical work.
It was, however, in the famous Sonata in A major ("Kreutzer") of Beethoven that the true authority, panache and dazzling technical gifts of the duo were richly displayed. This was real virtuoso playing.
Ross-shire Journal / Recital with violinist Kaoru Yamada in Invergordon