Biography (read more)
Howard Shelley was born on 9 March 1950. He was educated at Highgate School and then at the Royal College of Music, where he won the premier prize at the end of his first year.
His professional debut season included a London recital and a televised BBC Proms concert with the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas. He made his conducting debut in 1985, and the two strands of his work have run in parallel since. He held positions with the London Mozart Players for more than twenty years and is now their Conductor Laureate, and has worked extensively with orchestras internationally.
He received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Music in 1994, conferred by the Prince of Wales, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2009 New Year Honours. He married the pianist Hilary Macnamara in 1975; she died in 2021. Their son is the conductor Alexander Shelley.
Shelley is associated above all with Rachmaninoff. He was the first pianist to perform the composer’s complete solo piano works in concert, doing so during the fortieth anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s death, and he has recorded both the complete piano music and the concertos.
The wider recorded output is unusually large: more than seventy-five commercial recordings for Chandos, Hyperion and EMI. It includes concerto series devoted to Mozart, Hummel, Mendelssohn and Moscheles, and to British composers including Alwyn, Bridge, Howells and Vaughan Williams. Much of that catalogue consists of repertoire that was little recorded before he took it up, so his influence has been partly a matter of what is available to be heard at all.
The parallel conducting career, and in particular his long association with the London Mozart Players, has meant that a substantial part of this work was directed from the keyboard rather than made as a soloist under someone else’s baton.
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