Gordon Charles WatsonAM was an Australian classical pianist and teacher. He taught at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music from 1964 to 1986, retiring as Head of the Keyboard Department.
As early as 1943, commentators such as Neville Cardus were noticing that his piano playing, while showing great skill and promise, revealed the soul of someone other than a performer. Watson spent some years living in the United Kingdom as a touring performer. On 22 October 1951, to celebrate the 140th anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt, he performed the complete Transcendental Études in a concert at the Wigmore Hall. On that occasion he also premiered Humphrey Searle's Piano Sonata, Op. 21, written for the occasion. Watson later recorded the sonata, but the recording was quickly deleted. In 1957 he was able to introduce Searle to his teacher Egon Petri. Watson wrote the sleeve notes for the LP recording of classic Egon Petri performances issued by EMI in 1967 as number 7 in its Great Instrumentalists series. In 1951 he was chosen by Constant Lambert to play the difficult piano part in the premiere of his final ballet, Tiresias. In late 1952 he gave the premiere performance of Darius Milhaud's 1st Piano Concerto, in London. In 1954/55, Watson commissioned a piano concerto from Humphrey Searle, but was unable to be the soloist at the premiere at the Cheltenham Festival in July 1955 as he was touring in Australia. He did, however, premiere Searle's 2nd Piano Concerto, Op. 27, on 14 August 1956, at the Royal Albert Hall, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under John Hollingsworth. On 20 August 1956 Watson and Thea King gave the first performance of Humphrey Searle's Suite for Clarinet and Piano. In 1958 on a visit home to Sydney he was asked by Winifred Burston, a renowned piano teacher at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, to assess the young Larry Sitsky's skills. He did so, and he and Burston jointly formed the view that Sitsky would benefit from study with Egon Petri, who accepted him as a pupil. Sitsky went on to study with Petri for over three years, from May 1958 until the end of 1961. In 1950 in London he also gave some months of lessons to another of Burston's pupils, Geofrey Parsons. Gordon Watson played the solo piano part of Brian Easdale's score for the controversial 1960 Michael Powell film Peeping Tom. In 1964 Sir Bernard Heinze appointed Watson to succeed Winifred Burston on the teaching staff of the Sydney Conservatorium. He was the head of the Keyboard Department until 1986, being succeeded by Elizabeth Powell |Elizabeth Powell. His students included: Gerard Willems, Michael Kieran Harvey, Stephanie McCallum, Elena Kats-Chernin, Carey Beebe, Barry Walmsley, Brennan Keats, Garry Laycock, Romano Crivici and Peter Carthew. He was a juror for the Sydney International Piano Competition in 1981 and 1985. The Australian pedagogue and composer Alex Burnard, a student of Ralph Vaughan Williams, wrote a set of Twelve Folk-Songs Settings for Watson. Gordon Watson died in Sydney on 16 April 1999. An obituary appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on 27 April.
Peter Warlock: song cycle The Curlew with Alexander Young, tenor; Lionel Solomon, flute; Peter Graeme, English horn; and the Sebastian String Quartet. It may be heard.
