Biography (read more)
John Ogdon was born in Mansfield Woodhouse on 27 January 1937 and trained in Manchester, where his fellow students included Birtwistle, Goehr and Maxwell Davies — the New Music Manchester group. Joint winner with Ashkenazy of the 1962 Tchaikovsky Competition, he burned through a huge career before mental illness broke it; he returned to the platform and died in London on 1 August 1989, at fifty-two.
Ogdon possessed one of the great sight-reading minds and an appetite to match: Busoni’s concerto, Alkan, Sorabji’s Opus clavicembalisticum, alongside Liszt and Rachmaninoff played with volcanic breadth. His recordings preserve a pianism of total risk, and in comparison after comparison his is the reading that goes furthest.
Sources: