Catherine Duncan is a Scottish pianist currently based in London. She is active both as a soloist and chamber musician and gives regular performances throughout the UK. In parallel to her performing career, Catherine is the founder and Artistic Director of the Three Rivers Festival, established in 2025 in the Stirling area in Scotland. She is also a Visiting Teacher of Piano at Lancing College, Sussex.

 

She is passionate about music as an instrument of dialogue and about classical performance as a powerful means of bringing people together.

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In July 2026, Catherine made her debut at Wigmore Hall with cellist Eryna Kisumba, performing works by Beethoven, Prokofiev and Boulanger in their "Music for the Moment," series. During the second edition of the Three Rivers Festival this year she played alongside tenor Matthew McKinney, 2024 Winner of the Kathleen Ferrier Award giving the opening recital in Dunblane Cathedral, and again in the finale performing Beethoven's C Major piano concerto in an arrangement by Lachner for piano and string quintet.

 

Catherine loves to curate programmes which allow works to be heard with a fresh perspective and which draw upon little explored links between composers. As a semi-finalist of the BBC Scotland Young Classical Competition she featured on BBC Radio Scotland playing Villa-Lobos and Ginastera. She has given solo recitals in Rome, Dunblane and in Birmingham performing a programme which included solo works by Bach and Rachmaninov, and culminated in Rachmaninov’s Transcription of Bach’s Violin Partita in E major.

 

Catherine completed her final year of undergraduate study with Alasdair Beatson at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire where she was supported by the Malcolm Bullock Memorial Trust Award. There, she was recently awarded the Marjorie Hazlehurst Piano Award, given to a student “whose Major Project demonstrates the greatest imagination, enterprise and highest level of performance.” This project entailed Catherine performing Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 15 in an arrangement for piano and string quintet by Vincenz Lachner with colleagues from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. She has received a scholarship to undertake an Artist Masters at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where she is studying with Carole Presland. Catherine completed her Masters with distinction in June 2025, and is now continuing her studies at Guildhall for her Advanced Artist Diploma, studying with Carole Presland and Dr Bretton Brown.

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Before moving to Birmingham, Catherine studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Junior Department with Claire Haslin. During these formative years she also studied violin with Kathleen Simans. Her experience at the Junior Conservatoire deeply impacted her, fostering a love not only of music and performance but of the intrinsic value of musical connection. This instilled in her a strong desire to give what she had received back to the next generation and fulled her passion for music education.