Antony Peebles was educated at Westminster School and – as a musical exhibitioner – at Trinity College Cambridge. After gaining the Mus. B there he studied piano with Peter Katin, receiving scholarships from various sources. He also studied with Yvonne Lefebure (on a French Government scholarship) and with Jeremy Siepmann.

In 1971 he won the BBC Piano Competition (with a unanimous vote from the jury), and the following year he won the Debussy Competition in France.

Since then Mr Peebles has maintained a very busy performing career. The main feature of this has been the remarkable amount of overseas touring it has entailed: Mr Peebles has now given solo recitals in, astonishingly, 122 different countries. The most recent additions to the list have been China, Taiwan, British Virgin Islands, El Salvador, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Mr Peebles also appears regularly as classical pianist giving recitals aboard Pand O’s four cruise ships (Oriana”, “Aurora”, “Areadia” and “Victoria”).

At home in the UK he has played as concerto soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, the Halle, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the City of Birmingham Symphony, the BBC Welsh, the BBC Philharmonic orchestras, the City of London Sinfonia, etc. He broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3 and plays for music clubs up and down the country.

He records for Meridian Records. These recordings include a CD and cassette of Ravel piano music, a CD of Liszt operatic transcriptions and fantasies, and a CD of Schubert songs transcribed for piano solo by Liszt – this being the first in a series in which he will record all of the 55 Schubert songs transcribed by Liszt. “Classic CD” magazine, reviewing the first of these Schubert songs CDs, placed it number 3 in their list of Best Recordings of the Month (December 1998): “Peebles has all the instincts of a great Lieder singer and the necessary technique to play Liszt’s fiendishly difficult, though always idiomatic, pianism …….. Antony Peebles’ playing is quite miraculously cantabile”: the CD is summed up as a “disc of pure magic”. “BBC Music Magazine”(September 1998) said of it: “As his previous Meridian release of Liszt transcriptions showed, Mr Peebles is a gifted Lisztian, with a Arrau-like intensity of purpose and concern for detail. The present lingering thoughtful collection …….. music largely of poignant, sad undercurrent – shows him to have a feeling for beauty of touch and tone equal to the best Schubert/Liszt masters.” “Hi-fi News and Record Review” (October 1999) awarded it “1*” which is their highest classification for performance.

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