Jonathan Powell

Jonathan Powell (12 November 1969 – 27 December 2025) was a British pianist, musicologist, music editor and self-taught composer. He wrote piano sonatas and string quartets, among other chamber music. As a player and musicologist, he focused on music from Russia and Eastern Europe around 1900, such as Alexander Scriabin, whose biography he contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He recorded rarely played music from the period, piano solo works by Georgi Conus, Konstantin Eiges, Alexander Goldenweiser, Egon Kornauth, Joseph Marx and Leonid Sabaneyev, among others, and piano concertos by Hans Winterberg and Xaver Scharwenka.

Powell lectured and played concerts regularly at Oxford University, and taught at institutions in Europe and the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. He was known for tackling the music by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, including the eight-hour Sequentia cyclica, which he premiered in 2010 and released to critical acclaim in 2020. A reviewer noted that "the pianist’s intelligent, fluid pacing and astute scaling of dynamics address Sorabji’s architectural ambitions seriously". His family inherited a piano when he was age six. His piano teacher in his late teens was Denis Matthews. He studied musicology at the University of Cambridge, graduating with a thesis about Scriabin's influence on Russian composers. He then studied piano further with Sulamita Aronovsky. He played UK premieres of works by Salvatore Sciarrino, Morton Feldman and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and commissioned new compositions. He performed works by Valentyn Silvestrov, Viktor Ullmann, and Hans Winterberg. In a 2024 recital he combined works by Egon Kornauth, Szymanowski, Felix Blumenfeld, Alban Berg, Jean Sibelius, Isaac Albéniz and Josef Suk.

Powell was known for his advocacy of the music of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, which he began performing regularly in the early 2000s. He gave multiple public performances of Sorabji's four-hour Opus clavicembalisticum (1929–30) and premiered other works by Sorabji, including the substantial Fourth Piano Sonata (1929) and the five-hour Piano Symphony No. 6, Symphonia claviensis (1975–76). Powell gave the world premiere of Sorabji's eight-hour Sequentia cyclica super "Dies irae" ex Missa pro defunctis (SC, 1948–49) in Glasgow in 2010. In 2020, he released the premiere recording of the work, and was recognised by the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik for the second quarter of 2020. Music writer Jed Distler said that Powell's performance has "a level of specificity and tonal application that gives new meaning to the word 'painstaking, "the pianist’s intelligent, fluid pacing and astute scaling of dynamics address Sorabji’s architectural ambitions seriously", making "a compelling and standard-setting case for SC that will be hard to equal, let alone surpass". Composer Christian B. Carey wrote that "Powell's dedicated work on behalf of Sorabji makes the composer's legacy seem assured." John Quinn described it as a "technically remarkable, idiomatically perceptive performance" of "a massive work performed with unremittingly massive conviction". His articles were published by , a Finnish musicological journal, and by International Piano. He contributed to a book about Samuil Feinberg, also a pianist and composer, and was co-editor for Rimsky-Korsakov and his Heritage.

He was a regular guest at Oxford University to play three concerts a year at the Jacqueline du Pré Hall, as well as teach and run workshops.

Personal life Powell was married to Irena Powell, also a pianist; they had two sons

Recordings Alexander Krein: After Scriabin Songs of the Ghetto (ASV) Grigory Krein: Piano Music (Toccata Classics) Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: Andrew Toovey: The Moon Falls Through the Autumn (Largo) Joseph Marx: Lieder, with Sarah Leonard, soprano (Altarus) Schmetterlingsgeschichten (Danacord) Christophe Sirodeau: Obscur chemin des étoiles John White: Adventures at the Keyboard (Convivium) Egon Kornauth: Piano Music Vol. 1 (Toccata) Georgi Conus: Piano Music (Toccata)