Barry Douglas (pianist)
musician from Belfast, Northern Ireland
William Barry Douglas (born 23 April 1960) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is a classical pianist and conductor.
Early life and education
He studied piano, cello, clarinet and organ while growing up in Belfast. He first studied in Belfast while attending Methodist College Belfast and, at 16, had lessons with Felicitas LeWinter, a pupil of Emil von Sauer and grand-pupil of Franz Liszt. In London he studied with John Barstow for four years and then studied privately with Maria Curcio, the last and favourite pupil of Artur Schnabel, going on to study with the Russian pianist Yevgeny Malinin in Paris. He won the Bronze Medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas in 1985 and second prize in the 1980 Paloma O'Shea Santander International Piano Competition in Spain. He won the gold medal outright in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1986.
Career
His debut album was a recording of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. He has made many recordings since then and in 2007 he completed (with Camerata Ireland) recording the five Beethoven piano concertos and the Triple Concerto (with Kim Chee-yun and Andrés Díaz). He is Artistic Director of the International Piano Festival in Manchester, England and the Clandeboye Festival in Clandeboye, Bangor, County Down. He founded Camerata Ireland in 1998 which had Elizabeth II and Mary McAleese (the then President of Ireland) as Joint Patrons.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Barry Douglas (pianist)” as musician from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as musician from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2166855. VIAF identifies the subject as 116803713. The Library of Congress control number is n87103333. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1985, 1980 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barry Douglas (pianist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.