The Keyboard Trust identifies today’s most promising young keyboard talent and enables them to perform in many of the most important music centres in Europe and the Americas. By giving them access to an expanding circuit of international concert platforms, the Trust helps them to make the vital transition from final education to a fully professional life and to build up an international following. Established in 1991, it received its lifeblood with a benefit concert in the Royal Festival Hall in 1993 given by Claudio Abbado (together with Alfred Brendel the two earliest Trustees) with the then European Community Youth Orchestra and Evgeny Kissin as the soloist. Notable support by the late Marion Frank and Nicola Bulgari has enabled it since then to grow into an effective vehicle for sponsoring some 140 outstanding young talents.
Alfred Brendel, Trustee
The Trust has created an international network of platforms, currently numbering more than 60 in 11 countries in three Continents, on which artists can be presented and become recognised as the standard bearers of tomorrow’s classical music. These platforms range from teaching institutions to patrician homes to a growing number of the great Concert Halls in the UK, Germany, Italy and the Americas. By now the Trust had already given international platforms to some 140 of the world’s most talented young keyboard players. If there is a benefit, it must be found in the development of their careers from that point on. Besides ample testimonials from the musicians themselves, a recent survey found that close on half had made substantial careers, either as performers or in high academic positions, or both. The publics in their thousands have also had the benefit. Each year the Keyboard Trust is responsible for a stream of sublime music which would not otherwise be heard, performed by supreme musicians who would not otherwise have played.
Lilit Grigoryan, Keyboard Trust Artist
Noretta Conci, concert pianist and teacher, student and assistant of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, was the original inspiration for the Keyboard Trust. Dedicated to her by her husband, John Leech, who witnessed the trials endured by even the most gifted soloists who aim to ascend in this profession, the Trust was meant to fill their prime need for performing opportunities and international recognition. Alongside the founders is a team consisting of the pianist Elena Vorotko, former student of Noretta Conci’s and Keyboard Trust artist, now Deputy Artistic Director, with the author and musicologist Moritz von Bredow in Germany, the well-known presenter and broadcaster Valentina Lo Surdo in Italy, Caroline von Reitzenstein in New York, and the Trust’s UK Administrator, Sarah Moyse.
