In conversation with Katy Hamilton

Katy Hamilton is one of the UK’s most sought after commentators on classical music. The musician, writer and presenter tells Artistic Director Lizzie Watson, about her motivation and enthusiam for sharing music.

LW: What was your journey into the classical music?

KH: My first encounter with classical music was sparked by my grandmother’s old 1980s electric organ. I was very little and I used to go around and poke the keys. I found it very exciting because it made all sorts of strange noises. So for my fifth birthday, my parents gave me piano lessons. Mine wasn’t a house in which there was a lot of music played and my parents weren’t trained in classical music at all. It was really from learning music from the age of five and then arriving at senior school with a very good head of music and some really fabulous piano teachers that cemented it. 

There were only two of us who did music A-level and by the time I finished school I had my grade eight piano. So I actually knew quite a lot about classical music without really understanding that I did. When I arrived at Nottingham University I suddenly realised I had a better sense of the classical repertoire than I had thought. It was also a very supportive place.

LW: How did your career evolve after that?

KH: I went to university thinking that I would end up becoming a teacher; I knew Music is not a degree that pays well. I nearly did a sound engineering degree because I also studied maths and physics. But music was my joy. I did a Master’s at Nottingham, then spent a year in Germany doing some research for a PhD at the Royal College of Music. 

University teaching was my career path. After completing my PhD I was offered a job as a history professor working with archive materials. I’d already been writing programme notes for some time. Then I found myself being asked to give museum tours. I was bringing visitors into the archive to talk to others, and so I began to be asked to interview them. I did my first on-stage interview with Roger Norrington, which was terrifying. But I was quickly interested in the presentation side of things. 

Initially, I imagined I would balance my career between the academic and the public fields. However, although I love university teaching, the chance to talk to people who know little about classical music, or who are uncertain of their knowledge, became increasingly of interest to me. I left the RCM and began to build relationships with venues and festivals, to write programme notes, give talks and conduct interviews. I was recommended to Radio Three and began working for Record Review and other radio shows.

Interviewing was not something I’d done much of at all. In the last five years I’ve had a lot people who have given me the opportunity to learn how to do these things. And I’m very aware of the importance of those who are 10, 15 years ahead in this industry, who have trusted me to try. It’s precisely the kind of richness of this ecosystem that makes careers like mine possible. I’m so grateful.

LW: What have you learned that has been most helpful?

KH: It’s going to sound very basic, but the biggest and most important thing I have learned around interviewing, is to give your whole attention to the person that you’ve asked a question of. I’ve found I’ve had the nicest feedback from people, when they sense I’m truly listening and it becomes a genuine conversation. It’s not at all that the audience is irrelevant, but that if one can make a relaxed space in a kind of intimate way, that works much better in drawing in an audience.

LW: I’m very excited about our Rhine Piano Festival next year, MRT’s first piano festival. What are you most looking forward to as our Festival speaker?

KH: Well, first of all, the sheer list of superstar pianists that we’ve got. I mean, the fact that we start with Eric Lu, fresh from his great win at the 19th International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, and the likes of Nelson Goerner and Elisabeth Leonskaja in the mix.

There are some seriously eminent players alongside some younger musicians. And I think the mix of the two is going to be really interesting in terms of the listening experience, because pianists approach repertoire in different ways at different points in their career.

I also think the variety of programmes will be really nice. On the one hand we have monumental works where we can really get stuck in to what Bach or Chopin are doing. But then we’ve also got some programmes with lots of short pieces. And so, in terms of putting together the talks and the programme notes, the fun of it is being able to alternate the deep dives with the pulling together of themes. I hope in some cases we’ll be introducing composers whose music some may not have heard before. Through these kind of miniatures we can show how these pieces fit so well with more familiar repertoire.

LW: You have this amazing ability to engage with different audiences. How do you pitch your knowledge to their different needs? 

KH: I think the big lesson for me has come from the only teaching job I still do regularly – and completely adore. It is to teach daytime courses at City Lit, which is a further education college near Covent Garden. The students don’t necessarily have any particular musical training or theory knowledge. I began thinking differently about how to speak to audiences and started exploring a more focused way of finding analogues – versions of the same thing in popular music or in literature or in art or in other situations. 

I really enjoy trying to find different ways of connecting with an audience base, because I don’t believe that just because you don’t have the technical knowledge means you’re incapable of understanding what the thing is. It’s then just a way of finding the correct formulation of words, or analogy, to allow somebody to find their own way of understanding what I’m talking about.

LW: Finally, why do you think what you do matters?

KH: I think it’s important because it is so easy to overlook the extent to which what people feel about classical music stems from what they read in programme notes and in interviews and marketing texts, and how much this shapes people’s sense of what classical music means to an audience member, or to somebody who is engaging with it, either professionally or in an amateur capacity as a performer. And we are in real danger at the moment of classical music being viewed as an elitist thing, masking the importance of the democratic element of what it can mean to engage with it, either as a performer or a listener. 

The fastest route to torpedoing all of this is to get carried away with a certain kind of marketing blurb that says nothing really, but is all about grandiosity, so that it loses sight of the basic meaning of people making music for each other. And in that sense I consider myself a kind of ambassador because I think it’s very important to be able to speak to as wide an audience as possible about why this music can be enjoyed by many people, and is of interest – how it can be approached as a way of exploring, as a way of relaxing or becoming excited. All of these are valid ways of engaging with this kind of music. 

I hope what I do is to allow the widest range of people to feel that they can be part of the conversation, and that it is inclusive. Even if they go to one classical concert – come to the talk, have a nice time, listen to the music and think afterwards ‘I don’t really love this, but I really like film scores by John Williams and maybe I’ll listen to that kind of music a bit more carefully now, because some of it sounded a bit like John Williams’. Great. Then I consider that a success. As much of a success as the person who wants to hear the complete Beethoven sonatas by Leonskaja next year at a major festival.

The Rhine Piano Festival runs for 8 days from 22–29 June 2026 and is available to book now.