We’re so excited to welcome Susie onto our team! She is a highly experienced collaborative pianist whose regular partnership with Roderick Williams OBE has brought her national recognition. Having always combined the mentoring of the younger generation alongside her performing career, Susie now has more space to consider new projects with intermediate and advanced musicians, looking to enhance and hone their performing and collaborative skills, be they pianists, singers or instrumentalists.
‘Pianist Susie Allan is appreciated as one of today’s most perceptive accompanists. Her poetry at the keyboard has established her in collaborations with significant voices including Emma Bell, Sophie Daneman, Susan Gritton, Nathan Berg, Rowan Pierce, Jonathan McGovern, Mark Padmore, and Roderick Williams.
Susie is recognised throughout the UK as a guest artist of the major concert societies and prestigious venues including the Wigmore Hall and Purcell Room, and at festivals including the Buxton, Endellion, Oxford Lieder and Three Choirs Festivals. She has made numerous appearances for BBC Radio 3 and for television including Proms Extra, and she played for the ‘Schubert Shorts’ Channel 4 series with Christopher Maltman and Claron McFadden.
Susie’s long-standing musical partnership with Roderick Williams stretches over twenty years. In an exploration of the three Schubert song cycles, a tour of Scwhanengesang, illustrated with poetry readings by Jenny Agutter, took them both sides of the Atlantic from New York City’s Park Avenue Armory to the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, London. Of her 2019 appearance at the Chipping Campden Festival John Quinn, of Seen and Heard International, highlighted that “..there is an added something when his recital partner is Susie Allan. There seems to be a special musical chemistry between these two perceptive artists….” In 2022 for the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ birth the duo performed at The Wigmore Hall, LSO St Luke’s, Bath Mozart Fest and Malvern Concert Club. The duo further collaborated in 2023 including for the Shropshire Music Trust.
An impressive discography of song repertoire on the SOMM Recordings label for which Susie has received high praise includes a debut disc, Severn & Somme, with Roderick Williams, noted by BBC Music Magazine as “revelatory”. “This present performance features not only beautiful singing but also what I can only describe as rapt piano playing by Susie Allan, with every chord and note perfectly weighted and placed”, describes Susie’s contribution in Celebrating English Song (2017) which followed. Their third disc released in 2020 explores the songs of Arthur Somervell about which Gramophone magazine commented “Superbly partnered by Susie Allan (whose deft touch and ingratiating tone are a constant source of pleasure)”. Susie‘s next disc released in 2022 for SOMM Recordings is of Stanford’s Children’s Songs collaborating with mezzo Kitty Whately and baritone Gareth Brynmor John.
Susie has accompanied masterclasses of many luminaries including Sir Thomas Allen, Elly Ameling, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Elisabeth Söderström and Roger Vignoles and at important musical institutions including the Britten-Pears School. Professor of Accompaniment at the Royal College of Music and Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama she was a former student of the Guildhall School herself. Susie derived much inspiration from her teachers and mentors including Paul Hamburger, Martin Isepp, Graham Johnson and Iain Burnside. She is recipient of the GSMD Accompaniment Prize, the Gerald Moore Award and a Geoffrey Parsons Memorial Award. She recently adjudicated the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s English Song Prize.’
