Annabelle Lawson has established herself as a pianist and chamber musician who exudes subtlety and vivacity in equal measure. She has performed widely across the UK and in Europe and Australia, in venues including the Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, Royal Festival Hall, Bridgewater Hall and Kings Place, as well as broadcasting live for BBC Radio 3 and national Australian radio. In recent years Annabelle has enjoyed a close collaboration with composer Gordon Crosse; her debut solo CD of his ‘Complete Works for Solo Piano’ was released earlier in 2024 and she has given the world premieres of two of his three piano sonatas, as well as his Etude. She is a passionate advocate of both new and obscure repertoire, having commissioned and premiered a large number of works with the Lawson Trio and recently performed Stanford’s little-known 2nd piano concerto, as well as chamber music by Xiaogang Ye, Paul Juon and Louis Vierne. Having performed recently as concerto soloist with the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra in Germany, played trios in a French château, worked as a cabaret artist in the Far East, played ‘Carnival of the Animals’ with kangaroo impersonating dancers from Ballet Rambert and, last but not least, worn an Octopus Hat on stage for Wigmore Learning – her career is notable for its variety and versatility.  

Annabelle enjoys a distinguished career as a music educator, tutoring piano students on both the BA and MA courses at Sheffield University, as well as at Sheffield Music Academy and in private practice. She has just been appointed Professor of Piano at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), to start in September. For 10 years she taught piano at the Junior department of the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London and she is also an examiner for the ABRSM, as well as a collaborative pianist for Sheffield University. She has been invited to tutor on the internationally acclaimed Piano Week at Rugby School, as well as guest lecturing at the Amy Yuan Academy, held at Harrow School. For fifteen years she was also the Artistic Director of Chamber Music 2000, for whom she organised and hosted numerous education workshops and inter-school showcase concerts, in venues including the Purcell Room, Menuhin Hall and Howard Assembly Rooms. 

From 2018-2020 Annabelle curated in:spire with - her own chamber music series in Sheffield’s city centre. As part of this series she performed in duo recitals with artists including Manchester Collective’s Rakhi Singh (violin), Ensemble 360’s Ruth Gibson (viola) and Naomi Atherton (French horn). In 2015/16, Annabelle also ran a concert series for the West Essex branch of the hugely successful Bach to Baby enterprise. This involved organising, hosting and performing in four concerts a month, aimed at babies, toddlers and their families. She now works regularly for Concerteenies, across Sheffield and South Yorkshire. Her work for this charity includes  outreach and education work, as well as creating multimedia resources for children. 

Annabelle studied piano as a child at Chetham’s School of Music, before reading music at King’s College, Cambridge. After completing her BA she undertook a one-year BMus, for which she gained a Distinction, during which time she researched the social role of the Argentine tango in Paris in the years preceding World War One. She then pursued postgraduate tuition in chamber music at the Royal Academy of Music, who went on to award her piano trio a two-year Junior Leverhulme Chamber Music Fellowship. Annabelle also holds a diploma in Integrative Psychotherapy from the Minster Centre, London and, from September 2024, she will study for a Masters in Psychoanalytic Observational Studies at the Northern School of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy in Leeds. Annabelle’s teachers have included her father, Peter Lawson, Ronan O’Hora and Philip Fowke.