John Rink is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the music of Fryderyk Chopin. He is a prize-winning author and widely respected expert on the manuscript and printed sources for Chopin’s works, on the performance history of the composer’s music over the past two centuries (including Chopin’s own performing practices), on analysis of the repertoire, on editorial practices, and on aspects of critical reception. He holds the post of Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge in the UK, a position created for him in 2009 when he became Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which was based at Cambridge. He is also Fellow in Music at St John’s College, Cambridge, in addition to holding Visiting Professorships at Royal Holloway London, Queen Mary London, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music.

 

John Rink has published prolifically on Chopin. The six books that he has brought out with Cambridge University Press include Chopin Studies 2 (with Jim Samson; 1994), Chopin: The Piano Concertos (1997, Polish translation by Aleksander Laskowski, 2015), and Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions (with Christophe Grabowski; 2010). The last of these won two international awards in 2012 (C.B. Oldman Prize; Vincent H. Duckles Award), and he has also received prizes for his book on the concertos and an essay on Chopin’s early music. His most recent book – Music in Profile: Twelve Performance Studies – was published by Oxford Unviersity Press in 2024. He has produced a wide range of articles on Chopin, along with acclaimed editions of the two piano concertos. He is Editor in Chief of The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition, which is published by Peters Edition London, and he is also General Editor of a series of books on musical performance which Oxford University Press released in 2017–18. Alongside this work is his direction of two major online projects focused on Chopin, namely Chopin’s First Editions Online (CFEO) and the Online Chopin Variorum Edition (OCVE).

 

John Rink studied at Princeton University, King’s College London, and the University of Cambridge, and he holds the Concert Recital Diploma and Premier Prix in piano from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He won a series of competitions as a young pianist, including the annual Youth Auditions run by the Philadelphia Orchestra. His career since then has straddled the worlds of performance and of academe, and he has given lecture-recitals and taught piano masterclasses around the world. Much of his recent work as a performer focuses on period instruments: he is an acknowledged expert on playing techniques relevant to the Pleyel pianos that Chopin himself favoured.

 

John Rink has been a member of the Program Board of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw since 2003 and is a member of the Editorial Boards of Studia Chopinowskie and The Chopin Review.