Colin Stone’s career as a performer began in the late 1980s. He was encouraged by Sir Charles Groves at the finals of the 1985 Young Concert Artist’s Trust and went on to win the Royal Over-Seas League piano competition in 1986. A Subsequent debut at the Wigmore Hall and numerous broadcasts on BBC Radio3 helped to establish his growing reputation and has led to performances around the world. A number of acclaimed recordings followed both of solo repertoire and chamber music with the London Mozart Trio which he founded in 1989. He gave his first cycle of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas in 2005 and most recently has been recording the Prokofiev sonatas.
Colin Stone has a particular affinity with the music of Shostakovich. In addition to his recent recording of the Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues Op.87, he has recorded the two Piano Trios and the Piano Quintet (Classic FM “Instrumental and Chamber Disc of the Month” June 2008) and, with Rustem Hayroudinoff, he gave the first performance in the West of the two-piano version of the Fourth Symphony, op. 43a, a work which they have recorded for Chandos. He also recorded the two piano sonatas and Preludes Op.34 for Olympia (now available on the Regis label). Colin Stone also appears in the documentary film, “The Unknown Shostakovich” along with Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Maxim Shostakovich, first shown at the Barbican Cinema. He first performed the complete cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues Op.87 at Cadogan Hall in London in a concert to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth: Vladimir Ashkenazy himself gave the pre-concert talk.
Colin Stone is a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Details of his other recordings and forthcoming concerts can be found on www.colinstone.co.uk