"You feel in his playing an uncommon depth of study and absorption that supports, and legitimises, a free imaginative licence." Independent on Sunday

As a pianist and writer, as an enlightening teacher and lecturer, Paul Roberts has a versatility and energy that takes him around the world. He has an especially active career in the United States, where he is a regular guest of the Juilliard School in New York and the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. On the West Coast he makes regular visits to Seattle, Portland and San Francisco, where he plays and teaches at the University of Washington, San Francisco Conservatoire and Portland State University. He is one of the few British pianists to have performed in the prestigious Portland Piano International series, and he returns to Portland every summer to perform at the Portland International Piano Festival. In the summer of 2007, his ninth visit to the Festival, he gave a series of lectures, recitals and masterclasses entitled Focus on Impressionism (click here for Portland Piano International).

Elsewhere he has given recitals and masterclasses at the conservatories of Sydney and Brisbane in Australia, at the Stockholm Academy, and in Madrid. In London he is an honorary Fellow of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He was recently appointed Visiting Professor of Piano at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. In France he is the musical director of the international piano summer school, Music at Castelfranc, and has been a jury member of the International Debussy Competition.

Paul Roberts is one of a rare breed of pianists with wide interests beyond the concert platform. His parallel career as a writer has led to a commission from Phaidon Press for a biography of Debussy, which will be published in Spring of 2008; he is also author of a celebrated book on Debussy, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Amadeus Press), a combined study of music, poetry and painting. Current projects include a further book for Amadeus Press Reflections: The Piano Music of Maurice Ravel, to be accompanied by a CD; and a series of DVDs, currently being recorded in Steinway Hall, New York, in which he discusses and performs works by Debussy and Ravel. The first of these, Mists, Fairies and Fireworks: Debussy Preludes Book I (Hal Leonard 331696) was released in the summer of 2006.

Paul Roberts has recorded two discs in a projected series of the complete piano music of Debussy. The first received a four-star recommendation from Classic CD magazine who wrote that it was "probably the most desirable modern recording of the Preludes currently available in the UK" while Erato Disques said his performances were "comparable to the very greatest."

More on Paul Roberts, with details of his books, CDs and DVDS, can be found at www.paulrobertspiano.com (click here)

"Paul Roberts . . . A truly creative performer." The Guardian