Biography
Susan Tomes is a pianist and writer. Renowned as a soloist and as a chamber musician, she’s the author of seven books.
Susan Tomes has won numerous awards as a pianist, both on the concert platform and in the recording studio. She grew up in Edinburgh and was the first woman to take a degree in music at King’s College, Cambridge, when co-education arrived at the college after 400 years. Her career encompasses solo, duo and chamber playing. She has performed in 29 countries (some of them many times) and has been at the heart of the internationally admired ensembles Domus, the Gaudier Ensemble, and the Florestan Trio, winners of a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. In 2013 she was awarded the Cobbett Medal for her services to chamber music.
She has made over fifty CDs, many of which have become benchmark recordings. Her recordings with Domus and with the Florestan Trio have won ten international awards and thirty-three ‘Best of the Month/Year/Decade’ designations from critics. She has served on many international competition juries and chaired the Piano Trio jury at the ARD International Competition in Munich in 2023.
Susan is a writer as well as a pianist. For her these activities are intertwined. In both playing and writing she is fired by a wish to understand music, explore its context and convey its meaning to listeners and readers. Her lecture-recitals have given listeners new insight into the music she performs.
She has written five acclaimed books about performing: Beyond the Notes (2004), A Musician’s Alphabet (2006), Out of Silence (2010), Sleeping in Temples (2014) and Speaking the Piano (2018). Her books are studied on performance practice courses around the English-speaking world and have inspired several PhDs. Her appeal to a diverse readership was demonstrated by her appearances at the Edinburgh International Book Festivals in 2016, 2019 and 2024.
Her sixth book, The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces, (Yale University Press, 2021) was a Book of the Year in The Spectator and the Financial Times, a Scottish Book of 2021 in The Scotsman, and won a Presto Music Award. Her seventh book, Women and the Piano – a History in Fifty Lives (Yale, 2024) was one of the New Yorker’s ‘best books of 2024’; the Wall Street Journal described it as ‘delightfully provocative and consistently informative’ and the Financial Times made it one of their Best Summer Books of 2024. It won a Presto Music Award for a ‘Book of the Year’. To raise awareness of the women featured in the book, Susan has been giving recitals of piano music by female pianist-composers whose music has delighted audiences.
Susan’s eighth book, Nocturnes and the Fascination of Night Music, will be published by Yale University Press in March 2026.
In 2023, Susan was one of fifty women chosen to be photographed for a special exhibition of portraits by award-winning photographer Jooney Woodward to mark 50 years of female undergraduates at King’s College, Cambridge. The portraits have now been permanently installed outside the Dining Hall in the College.
“A pianist who combines a rock-solid technique with a rare ability to communicate her deep understanding of the music she plays. With little fuss, Susan Tomes distils the essence of a piece of music into its purest form in the most profound and moving way.”
– The Scotsman
“Tomes writes like a dream and with such elegance, her erudition worn so lightly and her ‘insider knowledge’ dispensed so generously, that even those with a minimal interest in the subject must want to share the journey with her.”
– Gramophone
Unyoking the horses
Today's blog post is on quite a niche subject. When I was writing a short biography of pianist Sophie Menter (1846-1912) for Women and the Piano, I mentioned some of the extravagant things her fans used to do to show their adoration. When she played in Copenhagen in...
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