Pierre has trained both as a collaborative pianist and as a soloist. After earning degrees in performance from the Université de Montréal under the guidance of Paul Stewart, he furthered his training at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, where his teachers included Charles Owen, Joan Havill, and Eugene Asti. In addition to his activity as a recitalist – spanning solo, art song, and chamber repertoires – he has taken part in a wide range of musical projects. These have included lecture recitals, outreach performances in schools, film score recordings, and interdisciplinary productions combining music and theatre. Through master-classes and other projects, Riley’s practice as a performer has been enriched by his encounters with distinguished artists as Susan Manoff, Graham Johnson, Iain Burnside, John Perry, Pascal Devoyon, and Jean-Claude Vanden-Eynden. He is currently embarking on a PhD in Music at the University of Cambridge. Under the supervision of Professor John Rink, he intends to explore the performance of Bach's keyboard works on the modern piano, bringing early twentieth-century interpretative approaches to bear on the issues faced by pianists today in this repertoire. Pierre Riley’s research interests stem from his practice as a performer: in addition to the aesthetic issues surrounding Bach pianism and the present-day pianist’s relationship to the recorded past, he has an active curiosity about collaborative creativity in the context of piano accompaniment.
