Report by Tal Walker and Nuno Lucas

On 15 December 2025, the Royal College of Music hosted the study day ‘Piano Music of the 20^th Century: Interrogating Performance and Research’, which provided pianists and music scholars with a platform to share various approaches in understanding 20^th-century piano music and its performance practice. It was an exciting day filled with presentations, performances, and a roundtable panel discussion.

After a short welcome note by RCM’s Head of Research, Robert Adlington, the first session ‘Shaping an Informed Performance’, began with Nuno Cernadas’ (Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel) interdisciplinary approach to curating a performance of Scriabin’s late piano works through the integration of coloured-light projections based on the composer’s colour associations in Prometheus, Op.60. The following presentation by Ioana Carina Cirtita (University of Oxford) explored the music of Petra-Basacopol, particularly Ioana’s artistic choices in the absence of a performance tradition, by drawing on the composer’s extra- musical inspirations, testimonies, primary sources, and analysis. The session ended with Thomas Dennehy-Caddick’s (Royal Academy of Music) lecture-recital examining the role of silence in Barraqué’s Sonate Pour Piano through analysis of its serialism and spectrographic analysis of its discography.

The second session explored early recordings and featured Roy Howat (Royal Academy of Music & Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), who shared his insights into Debussy’s and Fauré’s 1912 Welte Mignon piano roll recordings. His presentation was followed by André Terrell Short (Royal College of Music), who discussed Chaminade’s early recordings and outlined his approach to analysing the composer’s late 19^th and 20^th-century performance practices through score annotation using special symbols.

Following a lunch break, a concert was given by RCM piano students, Leo Little, Ruuka Ogihara, and Dida Condria, who performed pieces by Bartók, Schönberg and Messiaen.

The third session, ‘Negotiating Traditions Today’, began with Aidan Chan from the Royal College of Music examining how Rzewski’s performance practice demonstrates that pianistic labour can promote aesthetic regulation in contemporary performance. Next, Gabriel Jones (Kunstuniversität Graz) discussed his interpretation of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück I, sharing a documented step-by-step process for making artistic decisions on tempo and dynamics based on his innovative practice-led research.

The day ended with our Keynote lecture-recital by pianist Ralph van Raat (Conservatory of Amsterdam & Accademia di Musica di Pinerolo) and a roundtable panel joined by Roy Howat, Inja Stanović (University of Surrey), Ralph Van Raat, and Andrew Zolinsky (Royal College of Music), chaired by Christina Guillaumier (Royal College of Music).

Ralph presented early, unpublished works by Boulez, characterised by the use of expressive tools and the deconstruction of traditional structures and forms, already foreshadowing his later style. The roundtable panel session concluded that although 20th-century music is often seen as calculated and absolute, composers sometimes change their approaches and even alter the scores. Therefore, the panel invited performers to explore multiple approaches to interpretation and advised not relying solely on conventions or prejudices.

This report was written by Tal Walker and Nuno Lucas, the conference co-organisers, pianists, and PhD candidates at the Royal College of Music, where they research and perform 20th- century piano music.