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Pianist
Joseph Tong is a versatile player with wide experience in solo piano, duo piano, and chamber music repertory. He is also a noted educator.
Tong grew up in the English county of Somerset, where he had his first lessons at the Wells Cathedral School with Hilary Coates. His brother
Daniel is also a professional pianist, and the two have performed together in duo piano literature.
Joseph attended Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, studying music and graduating in 1993. He went on to the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Christopher Elton and earned a DipRAM degree in 1995.
Tong also had private lessons with
Piers Lane. In 1996, he won the Maisie Lewis Young Artists Award, and part of the prize was the opportunity to make his recital debut at London's Wigmore Hall the following year. In addition to his brother,
Tong also frequently performs with pianist
Waka Hasegawa as part of the duo
Piano 4 Hands, and the pair has been in demand around Britain. They have performed at Wigmore Hall, Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, and St. George's Bristol, as well as other major halls, and they have appeared at festivals in Buxton, York, Cheltenham (three times), and elsewhere. It was with
Hasegawa that
Tong made his recording debut in 2009 with the album
Schubert: Piano Duets, released on the Quartz label.
Tong also has a flourishing career as a solo pianist. He often plays the works of
Sibelius and
Schumann and has performed them on tour at
Sibelius' home, Ainola (on
Sibelius' own Steinway piano), and in
Schumann's home cities of Zwickau and Leipzig. Both as a soloist and with
Piano 4 Hands, he has championed contemporary music, commissioning new works for
Piano 4 Hands from
Dai Fujikura,
John McCabe (whose
Upon Entering a Painting Tong recorded solo in 2011), and
Edwin Roxburgh. In 2008, he founded the Bristol International Piano Duo Festival, and he served as its co-director until 2017.
Tong was set to premiere a new set of solo piano pieces by David Matthews at the Three Choirs Festival in the summer of 2022. He recorded the complete piano works of
Sibelius in two volumes for the Quartz label in
2015 and
2017 and a collection of
Schumann pieces for the same label in 2019. In 2022, he moved to Resonus Classics, backing violinist
Fenella Humphreys on an album of
Sibelius works for violin and piano. He is a senior piano tutor at Wells Cathedral School. ~ James Manheim