Monday 23 March 2026, 7.30pm
This year, one of the UK’s most significant composers, Michael Finnissy, celebrates his 80th birthday. Australian pianist Rob Hao celebrates the occasion with a solo programme centered around Finnissy’s recent piano output alongside selections from his notorious English Country-tunes, tracing the composer’s ongoing conversations with folk music and the ways musical traditions travel. Two recent pieces receive their UK premieres, including one written for the performer.
PROGRAMME:
- Skladanje skozi slovenske pesmi (Composing through Slovenian Songs) (2023/4)*
- Tenth Political Agenda (2025)*
- Selections from English Country-tunes (1977)
- Violet, Slingsby, Guy and Lionel (1994–6/2021)
*UK premieres
This concert is supported by the Hinrichsen Foundation.
Rob Hao is an Australian pianist and composer. His compositions and performances have taken him around Australia, the UK and across continental Europe at festivals and venues such Sydney Opera House, the Melbourne Recital Centre, Aldeburgh, Manchester Festival of Song and Vienna’s Schoenberg Centre. Rob’s LP Palimpsest was released in 2025 and in recent seasons he has given regional and world premieres of over thirty works. Rob studied piano and composition at the Royal College of Music and currently lives in London.
Michael Finnissy was born in Brixton (south London) in 1946. He started composing aged 4, and was self taught until he gained a Foundation Scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1965, where his principal mentor was Bernard Stevens. Whilst there he secretly planned that his future work would assemble a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ - an individualised account of world music, representing (with affection and irony) all periods and genres. His ideology and aesthetics have been influenced by Underground and avant-garde cinema: Markopoulos, Brakhage, Jack Smith, Warhol, Pasolini, Jarman and Godard; the painters Hokusai, Cézanne, Degas, David Hockney and Robert Rauschenberg; and composers Erik Satie and Charles Ives. He served as president of the ISCM/IGNM from 1990 until 1966. His work has also focussed on theatre (vocal and dance) and on non-professional music-making, with CoMA (Contemporary Music for All) and church choirs. He is an Emeritus Professor of Composition at the University of Southampton (UK).
