Michael Kieran Harvey
Australian pianist and composer Dr Michael Kieran Harvey FAHA is among the foremost interpreters of contemporary piano music of his generation. A champion of Australian music, he regularly commissions new work and has performed with the country’s leading contemporary ensembles and orchestras.
Michael Kieran Harvey was born in Sydney and studied piano with Alan Jenkins, Gordon Watson, and at the Liszt Academy, Budapest, under Sándor Falvai. Based in Tasmania, his career has been notable for its diversity and wide repertoire. He has especially promoted the works of Australian and contemporary composers, premiering more than 300 Australian works alone, and has recorded many solo CDs on various labels. He is on the guest faculty of the Australian National Academy of Music, Adjunct Professor at the University of Tasmania, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Released in 2009, his CD Elektra was described by Clive O’Connell as the product of an “indefatigable master-pianist … pieces commissioned especially for his volcanic talent”. Harvey holds a PhD in composition and has recorded much of his own music. His homage to Zappa, 48 Fugues For Frank, was premiered at Mona Foma 2010 and won an AMC state award for best composition in 2011. His trio Deus est Fabula was premiered by Plexus at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s 2014 Metropolis series (available on PRTZL). A live CD/DVD of his Iyengar yoga and ensemble work Patañjali (2015) received an AMC/APRA Tasmanian State Award for Instrumental Work of the Year in 2016. Piano Sonata no. 3, Aporia, was premiered at the MSO’s 2016 Metropolis series. Piano sonatas nos. 4: A. Gramsci (on PRTZL), 5 (Piano Sonata #5: Greta), and 6 (Piano Sonata #6: 17 Graeme Lee prints) appeared between 2019 and 2021. His 90-minute Green Brain Cycle, after Frank Herbert, was premiered at Mona Foma in 2018 and released as The Green Brain. The epic Catalogue des Errances Bibliques for eight keyboardists and four percussionists followed in 2021.
Later releases include The Sparrow and the Mead Hall, with Four Ballades, Sonata #7 and Death Cap Mushroom Duo; a re-release of his twentieth-century programme Threnody; and Shichiseki, Australian and Japanese chamber music. He continues monumental cyclical works, including the APRA-nominated War Sonatas, honouring Peter Singer and long-time collaborator Arjun von Caemmerer while lamenting war and the rise of AI.
In 1993 Harvey became the first Australian to win a major international piano competition, the inaugural Ivo Pogorelich International Solo Piano Competition in Pasadena. Other awards include the Debussy Medal, Paris (1986), the Australian government’s Centenary Medal (2002), the 2009 APRA award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music, and the 2020 APRA Luminary award. His compositions have been performed in Europe, the UK, the Americas and Asia, and at major Australian festivals; they are held at the AMC. The Michael Kieran Harvey Scholarship, founded in 2006 to encourage future directions in Australian keyboard art music, has supported successive generations of pianists and composers.
In 2012 he gave the Peggy Glanville-Hicks address What would Peggy do?, on the cultural cringe in Australian classical music. A transcript is available here.
Press quotes
Brilliantly conceived and performed, Michael Kieran Harvey’s premier performance of his three War Sonatas was a tense, dramatic, hypnotic and deeply confronting musical experience, adding powerful new works to universal piano repertoire.
Michael Kieran Harvey plays superbly and with feeling
In years to come, the current era may well be seen as a golden age for Australian piano composition .. For sheer virtuosity, and for bringing out the best in an entire generation of Australian composers, there are few who can match Harvey.
Few Australian pianists can touch Michael Kieran Harvey, one of the most exciting exponents of contemporary music in the country
… Harvey’s pianism is superb. He is truly one of the most, if not the most, interesting pianists in the country…
As we’ve come to expect, Michael Kieran Harvey’s performances of all these works are astounding … Highly recommended
An unpredictable, exhilarating tribute to one of rock’s greatest instrumental pioneers. Like Zappa, pianist Michael Kieran Harvey is fearless and inventive. 48 Fugues For Frank is a unique tribute. ★★★★
Michael Kieran Harvey is one of Australia's great pianists.
Michael Kieran Harvey is featured on the following titles
The life in between
Michael Kieran Harvey anchors this solo piano programme with Martin Friedel’s final work, …the life in between…, then sets it among virtuoso scores by Pertout, Crossman, Spiers, Selleck and McAlley.
War Sonatas
Three piano sonatas by Michael Kieran Harvey, written as a response to twenty-first-century war. Spoken poems by Arjun von Caemmerer stand between the works, framing a triptych of anger, friendship and warning.
Composer
Threnody
Michael Kieran Harvey’s landmark 1995 Astra recital of late twentieth-century Australian piano music returns in a 2024 Move re-master. Premiere recordings by Harvey, Vine, Campbell, McCaughey, Byrne, Humble and Anderson form one continuous programme.
Composer
The Sparrow and the Mead Hall
Composed and mostly performed by Michael Kieran Harvey, these 2021 works move from the rarefied extended techniques of Piano Sonata #7 and Liszt–Busoni bravura in the Four Ballades to bebop wit in Lawyers… and metal-edged satire in Death Cap Mushroom.
Composer
Shichiseki
Collaborations with violinist Miwako Abe and cellist Alister Barker sit beside solos written for Michael Kieran Harvey by Gabriella Vici and Andrián Pertout, spanning Japanese, Latin American and South Indian influences.
Catalogue des Errances Bibliques
Michael Kieran Harvey’s epic Catalogue des Errances Bibliques deploys eight keyboardists and four percussionists with spoken narration by Arjun von Caemmerer: twenty-five musical pieces alternating with twenty-five short narratives.
Composer
Piano Sonata #6: 17 Graeme Lee Prints
Composed and performed by Michael Kieran Harvey in the 2020 pandemic, Piano Sonata #6 answers seventeen mixed-media prints Graeme Lee made that July. Music, image and Arjun von Caemmerer’s aphorisms remain sharply individual yet bound as one series.
Composer
Greta
Michael Kieran Harvey’s fifth piano sonata appears in a conventional piano reading and an electric keyboard interpretation. Subtitled Greta for climate activist Greta Thunberg, it is also tagged ‘Concerto in no need of an orchestra’.
Composer
Move 50
Twenty-four Australian composers mark Move Records’ fiftieth year with short new works gathered on this commemorative disc.
Composer
PRTZL
This release of original compositions by Harvey centres on the monumental Piano Sonata No. 4, a homage to the anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci. That theme runs through solo and ensemble works whose moods range from nostalgically whimsical to furiously satirical.
Composer
Arranger
Dancing to the Tremors of Time
A collection of music reflecting the art of Mona – eclectic, surreal and powerful. Michael Kieran Harvey performs new works for solo piano by seven Australian composers.
Luz Meridional (Southern Light)
A CD with bonus DVD. Luz Meridional was composed by Andrián Pertout for pianist Michael Kieran Harvey. Its twenty-four solo piano études each contain a quotation from an early Australian composer.
The Green Brain Cycle
Michael Kieran Harvey’s ninety-two-minute multi-instrument solo cycle draws on Frank Herbert’s 1966 ecological novel The Green Brain, pairing intense keyboard writing with Arjun von Caemmerer’s concrete poetry and spoken passages.
Composer
Aporia
Michael Kieran Harvey performs his third piano sonata in the company of four contemporary Australian works that show the range of Australia’s twenty-first-century musical languages.
Composer
Portrait of Bob Brown
Produced in support of the Bob Brown Foundation, this disc presents three new Australian chamber works from 2016: two by Michael Kieran Harvey and one by violinist and violist Emily Sheppard.
Composer
Michael Bertram Fantaisie-Sonata
Larry Sitsky wrote that Michael Bertram ‘writes fierce but exciting piano music’. Michael Kieran Harvey matches that charge in a programme built around Bertram’s large-scale Fantaisie-Sonata, with shorter piano works completing the portrait.
70 More Variations on "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"
The tune “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” has fascinated and irritated composers through the ages. In this second collection Julian Yu has commissioned a staggeringly diverse cornucopia of stylistic arrangements. Michael Kieran Harvey tackles scores from the frivolous to the frenetic, the fragile to the fragrant, the popular to the profound.
Composer
126 Variations on "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"
Michael Kieran Harvey performs Julian Yu’s 126 variations on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, a pedagogical tour of compositional craft. The tune appears in an immense range of classical, jazz and folk styles, many developed from well-known works.
Patañjali
This CD and performance DVD celebrates Patañjali’s Yoga-Sūtra in music and āsana (2015). Michael Kieran Harvey composed the score and plays keyboards, with Arabella Teniswood-Harvey (piano) and Eugene Ughetti (percussion).
Composer
Siva
Michael Kieran Harvey plays Australian piano masterworks of the last fifty years. Raymond Hanson, Gordon Kerry, Brendan Colbert, Helen Gifford and Neil Kelly are the composers gathered on this recital of concentrated virtuoso writing.
Inferno
Michael Kieran Harvey plays two solo piano works by Elliott Gyger. Harvey writes that they bookend Gyger’s extraordinary musical universe – which, like Messiaen, appeared fully-formed at a precocious age, and has deepened across a long career.
Psychosonata
Michael Kieran Harvey’s own works from 2007–2013, spanning serious intensity and cheerful pastiche. The half-hour piano sonata anchors shorter pieces with leading young Australian instrumentalists.
Composer
Astra 60
This recording captures a concert of Australian piano music celebrating Astra’s long support of Australian composers and performers. For sixty years the Astra Chamber Music Society has placed new Australian work beside international new-music currents, always with a distinctive cultural frame.
48 Fugues for Frank
A musical homage to the life and work of Frank Zappa, composed and performed by Michael Kieran Harvey, and complemented by Lingua Franka – concrete poetry by Arjun von Caemmerer.
Composer
Elektra
Australian piano music by Helen Gifford, Tony Gould, Andrew Ford, Julian Yu and Michael Kieran Harvey. The title work, Elektra, extends acoustic piano sound through computer processing, in a collaboration with sound engineer Michael Hewes, who shaped the instrument’s resonances in real time.
Composer
Dimensions of Night
Michael Kieran Harvey performs Larry Sitsky's epic solo-piano cycle. Dimensions of Night draws on ancient legend, myth and spiritual history, with a series of chords underpinning the harmonic sequence across the whole work.
The School of Natural Philosophy
Michael Kieran Harvey plays new music for keyboard by Graham Hair, Douglas Knehans, Martin Friedel, Richard Meale and Hilda Paredes, linking science, landscape and modernist piano writing.
Arranger
Crystal Vision
This volume in the Michael Kieran Harvey Collection presents solo piano works by Japanese composer Kanako Okamoto. Two pieces written for Harvey, Petite Suite and Suite, join the title work Crystal Vision, which first drew him to her music.
Broadway Boogie
Broadway Boogie gathers premiere recordings of recent Australian piano works by Andrew Ford, Andrew Byrne, John McCaughey, Nigel Westlake, Mark Pollard and Michael Kieran Harvey, loosely linked by allusions to New York. Melbourne’s Herald-Sun named it the best classical CD of 2008.
Composer
In the Time of Sakura: The Piano Music of Mike Nock
Michael Kieran Harvey plays twenty-seven fully notated piano pieces by Mike Nock. Eclectic in range, they draw on long-standing repertoire and new work written for this collection, a sonic diary shaped by jazz, classical and personal influence.
The Way of the Seeker
Written by Larry Sitsky in 2004 and played by Michael Kieran Harvey, The Way of the Seeker is a highly virtuosic solo piano work whose thematic material is drawn from fragments of oriental chant.
Preludes and Sonata of Messiaen and Shostakovich
Michael Kieran Harvey, piano. Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) were two of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. Both were remarkable in that they discovered their own unique and distinctive creative voice when they were in their teens.
David Joseph Selected Works, Vol. 2
The second volume of David Joseph’s selected works brings together the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, The Academy of Melbourne, and pianist Michael Kieran Harvey in three substantial late-twentieth-century scores.
Catalogue d'oiseaux
Virtuoso pianist Michael Kieran Harvey’s dazzling pianistic pyrotechnics are on full display in this live performance recorded in Hobart in April 2005. Each of the thirteen pieces in Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux explores the calls and environment of a single bird species.
Rabid Bay
Michael Kieran Harvey is one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary piano music of his generation. This recording presents some of Australia's cutting-edge piano music – bold and experimental, but also increasingly lyrical.
Composer
Tensile Flame
Michael Kieran Harvey’s two-disc piano programme pairs Liszt’s B minor Sonata and its early twentieth-century echoes in Skryabin, Rachmaninov and Ravel with a second disc of Stravinsky, Carter, Graham Hair and Carl Vine’s 1990 Piano Sonata.
A Handful of Rain
Inspired by Javanese gamelan and Japanese Shinto music, Mark Clement Pollard's ambient concert works pursue beauty and simplicity. A Handful of Rain gathers this acclaimed Australian composer's popular style from the mid-1990s.
Compositions by Michael Kieran Harvey also appear on
Carpe Diem: Piano Music from Italy
This recording celebrates Italy, and Rome above all, as a lasting place of artistic pilgrimage and inspiration. Italian-themed solo piano works frame the premiere of Michael Kieran Harvey’s Carpe Diem (2015).
Producer
Michael Kieran Harvey also appears on
Works for String Orchestra
Seventeen years after David Joseph’s Selected Works, Vol. 2 won wide critical acclaim, Works for String Orchestra gathers previously unreleased recordings, remastered for this album and showing his vivid, evocative style for strings.
Elephantasy: Orchestral and Operatic Music of Eve Duncan
Orchestral, chamber and operatic works by Eve Duncan spanning 2012–2018: a piano concerto shaped by the Sydney Opera House, excerpts from her Malouf–James opera The Aspern Papers, and smaller chamber pieces for varied forces.
Music from 4 to 40 Parts
Angeli Vocal Ensemble, pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, chamber choir Ensemble Gombert and the Four Seasons String Quartet perform Melbourne composer Vaughan McAlley’s music. The programme explores writing from four parts up to forty, in his distinctive approach to counterpoint.
Butterfly Modernism
Composer Eve Duncan’s third release is a two-CD set of chamber works that marks a clear shift in her musical language.
Music of Don Kay
Chamber works for piano, flute and cello by Don Kay. Four of the six pieces were written for these performers, among them three piano sonatas receiving their premiere recordings.
Curiosities: Chamber Music by Eve Duncan
Chamber music by Australian composer Eve Duncan, performed by artists from Australia and abroad, among them the Australian National Academy of Music String Ensemble and pianist Michael Kieran Harvey.
Exposé
This album spans nearly a quarter of a century of Peter Tahourdin’s chamber music, from 1971 to 1995. The works chart his compositional metamorphosis and draw on a wide range of influences and themes, from the structural procedures of Indian raga to texts from the Carmina Burana.
Other credits
Lennox Berkeley: Music for Violin and Piano and Solo Violin
Sir Lennox Berkeley was one of the most accomplished British composers of the twentieth century. His prolific output spanned opera, theatre and film scores, symphony, chamber and piano music, and a large body of choral work.