Michael Kieran Harvey

Michael Kieran Harvey (born 7 July 1961) is an Australian pianist whose career has been notable for its diversity and wide repertoire. He is renowned for commissioning and performing new music, and he has written works himself. He has especially promoted the works of Australian composers, such as Carl Vine, all of whose piano music he has recorded and much of which was written for him. He is also particularly associated with the piano music of Olivier Messiaen.

According to critic Clive O'Connell in The Age: "Few Australian pianists can touch Michael Kieran Harvey, one of the most exciting exponents of contemporary music in the country".

Michael Kieran Harvey was born in Sydney in 1961. He says that as a child he had great difficulty in coming to terms with being a musician, as he played four different codes of football and was also involved in surf lifesaving. His sister is the pianist Bernadette Harvey-Balkus; his brother Dominic Harvey is head of brass at the Australian National University and noted conductor; and, another sister Rowan Harvey-Martin is a violinist and noted conductor. His mother Anne (a student of Alexander Sverjensky) had to abandon plans to become a concert pianist when her father died in her mid-teens; and his father Francis was a journalist and for a time a freelance cellist. He is married to another pianist, Arabella Teniswood-Harvey.

Michael studied piano at the Canberra School of Music with Alan Jenkins, at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music under Gordon Watson, and at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest, under Sándor Falvai. He first came to international prominence by jointly winning with Edith Chen the 1993 International Solo Piano Competition founded by Ivo Pogorelić in Pasadena, California, in which he performed Carl Vine's Piano Sonata No. 1. At the time, this was the world's richest piano competition. He entered the competition not believing he could win, but as an excuse to go to Los Angeles to see Frank Zappa, who was very ill, and to seek permission to play his piano music in public. However, Zappa died on the day of the finals and Harvey did not meet him. His manager from Columbia Artists Management was Ronald Wilford, who was Glenn Gould’s manager, and at that stage Ivo Pogorelić's own manager.

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