Acclaimed as a “pianist of extraordinary gifts” (Gramophone) and “immense power” (The Times), Clare Hammond is recognised for the virtuosity and authority of her performances and won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award in 2016.
Last year saw her debuts at the BBC Proms, Konzerthaus Berlin, and Salle Bourgie in Montreal, and return visits to the Wigmore Hall, London’s National Gallery, and Raritäten der Klaviermusik in Husum. Clare recorded a disc of concertos by Britten, Tippett and Walton with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and George Vass, performed Rachmaninov with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Tom Fetherstonhaugh, and Hesketh with the Ulster Orchestra and Anna Rakitina. She gave the second ever performance of the recently revived Fantasia by Andrzej Panufnik, more than sixty years after its premiere, with the Filharmonia Poznańska and Łukasz Borowicz. In 2025, Clare makes her debut at the Royal Albert Hall, performing Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto with the Philharmonia and Christopher Warren-Green, and premieres a new concerto by Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Emilia Hoving.
Contemporary music is at the core of Clare’s work. She has given over 50 world premieres, including those of major works by Arlene Sierra, Robert Saxton and Michael Berkeley, and her discography includes world premiere recordings of over twenty works. In 2019, she gave the world premiere of Kenneth Hesketh’s Uncoiling the River with Martyn Brabbins and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and a further performance with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Vasily Petrenko. In 2022, she premiered Graham Fitkin’s new piano quartet with Fitkin, Ruth Wall and Kathryn Stott at the Aldeburgh Festival, and opened the Southbank Centre’s 22/23 season at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the work.
Clare has recorded six discs for BIS, most recently releasing an album of Etudes by visionary French composer Hélène de Montgeroult, launched in a special concert at London’s National Gallery and featured extensively on BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week and Essential Classics. The disc was selected as Editor’s Choice in Gramophone. Reviewers noted the historical importance of the etudes and the ideal match with Hammond’s virtuosic and lyrical abilities. She previously recorded a disc of 20th- and 21st- century variations which received extensive critical approval, and a disc of etudes by Unsuk Chin, Nikolai Kapustin, Sergei Lyapunov and Karol Szymanowski which won her an Opus d’Or from Opus HD magazine and 5 diapasons from Diapason. Youth, an album of music written for Clare by Edmund Finnis won an Edison Klassiek Award and Presto Classical's 'EP of the Year' Award in 2024. In December 2025, Clare will record repertoire by Ravel, Tailleferre, Bonis, Barraine and Chaminade for BIS Records.
Community engagement forms an increasingly important part of Clare’s work. She recently founded the Gloucestershire Piano Trust to support her ongoing work in schools and prisons, which reaches around 3,000 schoolchildren and 300 prisoners each year.
Clare completed a BA at Cambridge University, where she obtained a double first in music, and undertook postgraduate study with Ronan O’Hora at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and with Professor Rhian Samuel at City University London. She completed a doctorate on 20th-century left-hand piano concertos in 2012. In 2014 Clare was paired with French pianist Anne Queffélec on the Philip Langridge Mentoring Scheme run by the RPS.
This biography is for information only and should not be reproduced.
Kenneth Hesketh: Hande - Music for Piano
Paladino Music, November 2024
This generously filled disc celebrates the longstanding and fruitful artistic partnership between composer Kenneth Hesketh and pianist Clare Hammond. Dating from 2006 to 2023, the contents includes several works written specifically for the performer. While the music offered here is searching and often technically demanding, the results are invariably engaging and illuminating.
Poetic Conceits (2006) is a set of six, unbroken movements in which the protean material is constantly being viewed in a different light, either through development or by varied restatement. Clare Hammond is poised and persuasive in this challenging piece, whether in the fiery opening Epigram, the impish Epigraph and the volatile Mad Pursuits, or in the vast stillness of the contemplative second movement and eloquent wistfulness of the opening of the fourth. By turns virtuosic, exploratory and visionary, this substantial piece, consummately played, makes a powerful opening statement.
The other two extended works presented in this conspectus are just as vivid and concentrated. Hände (2015), from which this album takes its title, is a wide-ranging, single-movement work that incorporates chiming desk bells and extended piano techniques. These diverse expressive means are employed solely to further a musical narrative that is far-reaching and, in the hands of Clare Hammond, deeply compelling. Written in 2023, Auszüge aus einem kleinen Totebuch ('Excerpts from a little book of the dead') is an elegiac tribute to the composer Joseph Horovitz, a friend and colleague of Kenneth Hesketh. Material from what is arguably Horovitz's greatest work, his fifth string quartet, is included in a musical argument that involves the occasional use of a Tibetan prayer bowel, a hand-held electronic bow, and plucked strings to enhance the music's rapt, devotional character. Clare Hammond's dedicated, poetic and finely realised interpretation touches the heart and always serves the music.
Of the four shorter pieces, two are memorial tributes: Pour Henri (2011) is a gentle, affecting homage to Dutilleux and Lullaby of the Land Beyond, written in 2018 in memory of Oliver Knussen, is mystically evocative. Heu, heu heu (2012) and Chorales and Kolam (2019) are birthday gifts, the first boisterous and the second thoughtful and intricately wrought.
Clare Hammond is an ideal exponent of Kenneth Hesketh's questing and distinctive keyboard scores. Bravura passages are handled with notable assurance and invention and the quieter, more inward aspects of the music are treated with devoted care and profound understanding. Richly documented and effectively recorded, this is an extremely desirable release.
Paul Conway, Musical Opinion, 5 stars
Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
BBC Proms 2024
The solo pianist in Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934) was Clare Hammond, who grew up in Nottingham. Noted for her refinement and virtuosity, she brought considerable panache and expressive sweep to the piece. Every section was sharply characterised in a fluently unfolding narrative that struck an ideal balance between playfulness and elegance. Bravura passages were delivered effortlessly, but brilliance for its own sake was never part of this consummate performer’s considered and imaginative approach to the music. Anna-Maria Helsing and the BBC Concert Orchestra provided keenly responsive support, ensuring this beloved mainstay of the repertoire sounded fresh and compelling.
There was a delightful, brief encore from the soloist in the form of Cécile Chaminade’s Etude Op.35 No.5, Impromptu. Clare Hammond was alert to every shift in mood and shade of colour in this delectably mercurial miniature.
Musical Opinion
Lakeside Arts / solo recital
Nottingham, 10 April 2025
Clare Hammond’s Nottingham recitals are always keenly anticipated, not only because she grew up in the city but also because her programmes are always so imaginatively planned and executed.
Clare is the ideal exponent of Ravel’s piano music. Its complexities require a formidable technique – and Clare certainly has that. In fact, it was a joy to see her fingers at work in pieces which require some extraordinary digital gymnastics....
More than anything, Clare’s playing explored the tension between the suite’s surface charm and its subtly darker undercurrents.
...Clare used her musical intelligence to bring into vivid focus the full range of Debussy’s intimacy, wit, brilliance, mystery and unfailing originality. Just as she had done with the rest of her programme, which also featured some richly mysterious Fauré and the delightful piece of Dutilleux which followed as encore.
William Ruff, Reviews Gate
Espresso-Konzert recital
Konzerthaus Berlin, September 2024
The main pleasure of the afternoon, however, was the concert by the English pianist Clare Hammond, who presented an unusual solo program, focusing on works by Hélène de Montgeroult and Cécile Chaminade.
Two years ago, Hammond dedicated an entire CD to de Montgeroult, who was born in 1764, which was honored with awards by the BBC and the British classical music magazine Gramophone. Hammond presented three of the Frenchwoman's varied etudes in her Berlin concert, which demonstrated pars pro toto the high level at which de Montgeroult composed. The harmonically interesting E-flat major Etude No. 62 and the urgent G minor piece No. 111 from the Cours complet pour l'enseignement du forte-piano are particularly worth playing more often in concert halls.
The pianist gave a brief account of the dramatic life story of Hélène de Montgeroult, who allegedly escaped death by guillotine in 1793 only because of her piano interpretation of the Marseillaise and who two years later became the first female piano professor at the Paris Conservatory.
Like de Montgeroult, Cécile Chaminade, who was almost a hundred years younger than her, was completely forgotten for decades, along with her compositional work. Even if the late romantic tone of Chaminade's etudes seems outdated from the time when they were written, her solo piano pieces are well worth rediscovering as timelessly beautiful music and a challenge for ambitious pianists. Clare Hammond is by no means the only pioneer to champion Chaminade's work, which also includes sacred works and at least one opera. But her concert was a reminder that the majority of audiences have missed out on a great deal of good music simply because works by women have hardly been on concert programs for a long time.
Which does not mean that Clare Hammond foregoes the far more well-known “male” repertoire. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was one of the most popular piano sonatas ever on the programme. Have you heard it a thousand times? Maybe, but thanks to Hammond’s intimate, never pretentious interpretation, the beauty of the three movements was particularly touching. The last item on the programme of the one-hour concert in the Werner Otto Hall were three of Chopin’s Etudes op. 25, with the not-so-bitingly cold Winter Wind Etude No. 11 as the finale. And because the audience wanted to hear even more of Clare Hammond’s light-as-a-feather, precise and beautifully sounding playing, she presented one of her specialities as an encore: a piano etude by Unsuk Chin. She has studied the etudes in detail, which at first glance seem simple but are delightfully complicated. She gives tips on how best to work through them on the Internet and does not hide how complex and difficult she finds these “practice pieces” to be to play. Here too, Unsuk Chin’s etudes are worth playing and listening to. The audience at the Espresso concert thanked her for the rare experience with long-lasting applause
Das Orchester
Cheltenham Festival recital
Cheltenham, July 2024
Clara Schumann’s Three Romances, Op.21 (1853) benefitted from Clare Hammond’s searching, freely expressive approach to her craft. There was an unforced depth of feeling to the opening Andante, with its flowing central episode bringing warmth as well as vitality.
Paul Conway, Musical Opinion
Ideally suited to Clare Hammond’s naturally fluent, at times almost liquid, pianism, Sun Keting’s set of four intricately woven, toccata-like transcendental studies beguiled the listener with hypnotically recurring motifs and patterns. In this elegantly rhapsodic first performance, the filigree writing’s technical challenges and the expressive demands of creating and sustaining a precise mood were sublimated into a compelling reading of numinous intensity.
Paul Conway, Musical Opinion
Recital/ Husum Festival
Raritäten der Klaviermusik (Husum), August 2024
"what the British pianist Clare Hammond has to say and play... fundamentally shakes our image of the early nineteenth century."
Jan Brachmann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Edmund Finnis: Youth (EP)
Pentatone, 2024
The cycle gains much from Clare Hammond's exquisite performance...As Hammond has noted, a special glow and sonic lustre come across in Finnis's music, above and beyond the structures and systems that underpin it, as this mini-album demonstrates in abundance.
Pwyll ap Sion, Gramophone
Ghosts & Whispers
Fundacion Juan March Madrid, April 2023
Clare Hammond proved to be a pianist of high quality, capable of tackling very different styles of music with solid technique and interpretive flexibility. Hammond interprets a series of short fragments, often incomplete or sketchy, by Janacek, Mozart, Schubert, and interesting and infrequently heard pieces such as the Elegy of Elizabeth Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, or the arrangement for the piano of the chorale from Stravinsky's Symphony for Wind Instruments in memory of Debussy.
Tomas Marco, Scherzo
Piers Hellawell: Rapprochement (WP) with the Ulster Orchestra and Jamie Phillips
Ulster Hall, March 2023
Hammond’s clarity as a performer was on full display, executing break-neck chromaticism with gentle poise...Hammond approached this introspective work with a meditative passion: seventh chords endlessly inverted over gentle pizzicato strings, drifting softly upwards into emptiness.
Thomas Neill, Journal of Music
Hélène de Montgeroult: Etudes
BIS Records, November 2022
Where will Clare Hammond pop up next? If she is not championing new works and recording their world premieres, she is appearing as the young Miss Shepherd in the film of Alan Bennett's 'The Lady in the Van' or giving us the complete music for keyboard by Josef Myslivecek. Now she turns her attention to the extraordinary Hélène-Antoinette-Marie de Nervo de Montgeroult...[Hammond's notes are] elegantly written and diligently researched [and in] her judiciously ordered selection, you might detect prescient hints of Schumann, Brahms or even Debussy...These are no dull finger drills but studies which combine technical exercises with music of depth and poetry. Nimbly executed, sensitively phrased, and beautifully recorded, Clare Hammond has left all pianophiles in her debt...An early contender for next year's Gramophone Awards"
Jeremy Nicholas, Gramophone Magazine *Editors Choice*
Two possible surprises lurk in my album of the week. One is that the pianist Clare Hammond, noted for her muscular power, can also touch the keys as if stroking a Siamese cat. The bigger surprise may come from the music: 29 études by Hélène de Montgeroult, a noblewoman who supposedly avoided jail during the French Revolution by moving her judges to tears after improvising variations on “La Marseillaise”...
Listening to the subtle simplicity of this music (first rediscovered in the 1990s), I almost shed a tear myself. Conceived as technical exercises in playing with crossed hands and other niceties, these pieces reveal an imagination and vitality that easily lift them onto a higher plane.
For music published in 1816 and chiefly written some time before, it’s also adventurous music, tied to classical forms yet with a romantic spirit recalling later figures like Mendelssohn and Schumann. Above all, this is music of very high quality; and it falls under Hammond’s fingers with a thoughtful beauty that should make many new friends both for herself and for the composer she so excellently serves.
Geoff Brown, The Times ****
Clare Hammond's selection is well chosen and suitably contrasted, a fine representation of a composer whose music is more akin to early Chopin than to Mozart or Beethoven. These are seriously demanding pieces, yet Hammond delivers them with a smooth and mellifluous touch, capturing the music's twilit subtleties and silken textures as if it's second nature...it draws you in and exerts a fascinating magnetism. Hopefully this valuable project should lead to further exploration of her works.
Jessica Duchen, BBC Music Magazine ****
The British pianist Clare Hammond shows that this miniature form has artistic worth, as well as the pedagogic value the name implies...Often songlike in the right hand, with turbulent, pulsating left hand accompaniments (as in No 107 in D minor), Montgeroult encapsulates the musical journey from classical to romantic, her artistic compass firmly pointing forward.
Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian
Clare Hammond plays this survey with great insight and skill, [and] also provides the excellent and informative liner note.... Gently melancholic Romanticism is prevalent across a number of the studies chosen by Hammond. She plays these with great sensitivity and just the right amount of expressive freedom as well as the requisite technical sophistication. In this she is helped by BIS’ typically reliable, fine and detailed SACD engineering. The use of Nimbus’ Wyastone Concert Hall and the Steinway D concert grand piano ensures this is a rich and full-toned soundscape...this is a hugely enjoyable and impressive disc both in terms of the music it presents and the care and skill with which it is performed. This music is of a quality and interest that transcends questions of gender or historical quirk. That it was neglected is a genuine mystery but now that it has emerged from the shadows I would fully expect this music and the name of its composer to become a much more regular feature both in the concert hall and on disc. An exciting discovery and a compulsory purchase for anyone interested in the evolution of piano music in the early 19th century.
Nick Barnard, MusicWeb International
“How can music of this quality and vision be forgotten so comprehensively for so long?”, asks pianist Clare Hammond. It is the right question...these Études, and particularly in Hammond’s readings, make the case well that de Montgeroult really is an important missing link between the classical period and Chopin and Schumann...
There is an astonishing variety of texture here: No. 34 (to give suppleness to the fingers) immediately followed by No. 28 (to play a melody with its accompaniment in the same hand) are both gloriously melodic, and really do sound like lyrical Schumann. No. 55 clearly pre-figures Chopin, and No. 65 is a fast-fingered firework display. I was completely taken by the case Hammond makes for No. 62 (Study for the left hand. Pour apprendre à chanter en se croisant sur la droite / "to learn to play melodically crossing to the right") which has some superbly executed hand-crossing and a lovely dialogue between the low voice and the higher voice. A wonderful collection of unfamiliar music, full of agreeable surprises, and with some true gems to uncover.
Sebastian Scotney, The Arts Desk
A beautiful selection...beautiful music, wonderfully recorded...[Hammond's] brilliant performances are clearly the result of deep reflection.
Colin Clarke, International Piano
Clare Hammond, whose previous disc Variations proved a particular favourite, has now brought us a revelatory recording of 29 Études by Montgeroult, which we must again hope will help to restore the composer’s fortunes with today’s audiences... As for the musical finesse, commitment and technical command of Hammond’s marvellous performances, Montgeroult could surely not hope for a more brilliant exponent. This is an important and hugely enjoyable release, superbly recorded and delivered, and should not be missed.
Piano Dao - Recordings of the Month October 2022
A complete revelation...Hammond has absorbed her soundworld and performs these gems with nuance, warmth and virtuosic fluidity throughout. Given that there are 29 études from the 114 here, there is surely scope for a follow-up, which would be greatly welcomed....her adventurous harmonies, complexity of texture, tempo changes and singing melodies, are foretastes of what we hear in the Romantic composers that followed her. The études were composed from around 1788 to 1812, by which time Schumann and Chopin were just 2 and Mendelssohn 3 years old. Yet if you didn’t know otherwise, the singing melodies over perpetual motion accompaniment of Études nos. 26 and 41, or the dancing energy or percussive textures of nos. 35 & 65, or the virtuosic trilling and insistent rhythmic energy of nos. 100 & 103, could be mistaken for Mendelssohn, Schubert or Chopin respectively. There are Beethovenian bagatalles, Field-like nocturnes, poignancy foreshadowing late Schubert, and even Brahmsian impromptus. Yet there is a clear individuality too in her expressive use of melody and her dense, rapid-moving textures.
Classical Notes
They are much more than exercises, pointing the way to Chopin’s works in the genre and, as Hammond rightly notes, coming very close to the sound world of John Field. The pieces are fastidious, elegant and testing – designed to stretch the player’s technique while teaching how to maintain a musical line, however hard the finger work. Each has a description of the particular quality Mongeroult is looking for the student to achieve. It will not be a shock to find that Clare Hammond passes these tests with consummate ease. She has just the right measure of relentless definition leavened by musical sensitivity to lift the music miles above its pedagogic function...The real glory is Hammond’s devotion to this music and her immaculate pianism. She is a pianist in a thousand and we can be grateful that there are 85 more Montgeroult études to record, quite apart from the rest of her work. It makes me believe too that Hammond may be maturing into a top rank interpreter of the early 19th century repertoire as well as the fearsome contemporary works with which she has been most associated up to now. More soon, please!
Present Arts
Clare Hammond was introduced to Montgeroult’s music as recently as 2019, and she used the opportunity given by the Covid lockdowns to make an intensive study of the composer’s music, carefully searching for the ideal balance between the singing tone which Montgeroult so valued (again anticipating Chopin) and the richness of harmonic shading and heightened expression...Hammond’s selection of 29 Études – roughly a quarter of the total collection – contains plenty of examples of their composer’s extraordinary inventiveness and depth of expression. Some of these pieces are intended to focus on strengthening the capability of the left or right hand in particular, others more generally with achieving tonal suppleness and dexterity, yet none come across as mere exercises – a tribute not just to Montgeroult’s visionary talent, but to Hammond’s own careful honing in repertoire that is still scarcely explored by most pianists. Dip into this disc at any point and you are likely to be amazed, as we were, by the extraordinary richness and variety of expression... Time and again, you’ll find yourself pinching yourself to realise that these pieces are not better known. Among our own particular favourites are the Schubertian expressivity and textures of No.62 in E flat and No.97 in G minor. But above all, it is the marriage of true cantabile tone and a heightened proto-Romantic sensibility that makes this collection – and Hammond’s performances – so unnervingly astonishing. No doubt at some point soon someone will record the complete collection of Montgeroult’s Études, but it is unlikely that they will match, let alone surpass, Clare Hammond’s achievement on this marvellously recorded new album from BIS. At a time when any minor scraps by great or neglected composers are hailed as discoveries, Hélène de Montgeroult is the real deal: absolutely essential listening, and not just for pianophiles.
Europadisc
In the 29 Etudes chosen by Clare Hammond, nothing is mediocre and true marvels are frequently encountered. The interpretation of these pieces requires a delicate approach based on the quality of sound, the smooth sequence of harmonies, and the balance between clarity of presentation and an intimate mystery that should be approached gently. Clare Hammond admits to having long searched for the key to Montgeroult's universe - she has found it.
Classica
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