Michael Kieran Harvey

He has recorded Carl Vine's complete piano music (including the 12 Preludes of 2006), much of which was written for him. He commissioned Nigel Westlake's Piano Sonatas I (1998) and II (2004) and Piano Concerto (2000) and gave the premiere performances. Harvey has commissioned and recorded major Australian piano cycles by Larry Sitsky, Keith Humble, Elliot Gyger, Mike Nock, Andriàn Pertout, Richard Vella, Alan Walker, John McCaughey, Graham Hair and Martin Friedel, and promoted major works by Helen Gifford, Mark Pollard, Kate Neal, Warren Burt, Eve Duncan, Colin Spiers, Kate Tempany, Tom Henry and Brett Dean.

He has performed and recorded most of Olivier Messiaen's works involving piano to high critical acclaim. In 2005 he released a live 3-CD recording of the Australian premiere of the entire Catalogue d'oiseaux featuring Peter Cundall as narrator. Despite his close association with Messiaen's music Harvey is an atheist, who describes himself as having escaped Catholicism in his early teens, as did Frank Zappa.

In 2005 the Michael Kieran Harvey Scholarship was established and funded by Susan Mary Remington in honour of his contribution to Australian music, and to encourage future directions in keyboard art music. Recipients: 2006 - Cameron Roberts; 2008 - Ashley Hribar; 2010 - Zubin Kanga; 2012 - Aura Go and Adam Cook; 2014 - Dr James Hullick; 2016 - Alex Rainieri and Nicholas Young; 2018 - Rohan Drape; 2020 - Dr Anthony Pateras.

Michael studied piano at the Canberra School of Music with Alan Jenkins, at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music under Gordon Watson, and at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest, under Sándor Falvai. He first came to international prominence by jointly winning with Edith Chen the 1993 International Solo Piano Competition founded by Ivo Pogorelić in Pasadena, California, in which he performed Carl Vine's Piano Sonata No. 1. At the time, this was the world's richest piano competition. He entered the competition not believing he could win, but as an excuse to go to Los Angeles to see Frank Zappa, who was very ill, and to seek permission to play his piano music in public. However, Zappa died on the day of the finals and Harvey did not meet him. His manager from Columbia Artists Management was Ronald Wilford, who was Glenn Gould's manager, and at that stage Ivo Pogorelić's own manager.

Michael Kieran Harvey (born 7 July 1961) is an Australian pianist and composer whose career has been notable for its diversity and wide repertoire. He is renowned for commissioning, performing and composing new music. He has especially promoted the works of Australian composers, such as Carl Vine, most of whose piano music he has recorded and much of which was written for him. He is also particularly associated with the piano music of Olivier Messiaen.

Michael Kieran Harvey was born in Sydney in 1961. He says that as a child he had great difficulty in coming to terms with being a musician, as he played four different codes of football and was also involved in surf lifesaving. His brother Dominic Harvey was head of brass at the Australian National University and is a noted conductor; his sister is the pianist Bernadette Harvey-Balkus; and his other sister Rowan Harvey-Martin is a violinist and noted conductor. His mother Anne (a student of Alexander Sverjensky) had to abandon plans to become a concert pianist when her father died in her mid-teens; and his father Francis was a journalist and for a time a freelance cellist. He is married to pianist Dr Arabella Teniswood-Harvey. Harvey has two children, Isabella and Raphael, from his first wife, the pianist Denise Papaluca.