Woodward, Roger (Robert)
Woodward, Roger (Robert)
Woodward, Roger (Robert), Australian pianist; b. Sydney, Dec. 20, 1942. He studied piano with Alexander Sverjensky in Sydney, then obtained a Polish government scholarship and went to Warsaw, where he took lessons with Zbigniew Drzwiecki. He won 1st prize in the Chopin Competition in 1968, an auspicious award that propelled him on an international career. In 1971 he settled in London, where he gained renown among international avant-garde composers by repeatedly performing works by such uncompromising celebrants of quaquaversal modern idioms as Takemitsu, Barraqué, Stockhausen, and Birtwistle; faithful to his antecedents, he also placed on his programs works of Australian composers such as Boyd, Meale, and Sculthorpe. He participated in several American concerts of contemporary music, including a marathon series presented in Los Angeles. In 1985 he played the complete works of Chopin in a series of 16 concerts. In 1986 he was soloist in the first performance of Xenakis’s Keqrops with Zubin Mehta and the N.Y. Phil. In 1980 he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire