Born in Sydney, Australia, John Talbot completed his piano studies at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music and, while still a student, performed piano concertos by Bartók and Ravel with the Queensland and Melbourne Symphony orchestras. Following a year’s engagement with the Australian Ballet as rehearsal pianist, and post-graduate studies in Music at the University of Melbourne, he undertook further musical study in the United Kingdom as the first recipient of the Robert Dalley-Scarlett Memorial Scholarship. He has been much involved since then with the music of British composers of the early twentieth century. As a concert pianist he has appeared with such distinguished artists as the baritones John Carol Case and Brian Rayner Cook, the violinists Ann Hooley, Yfrah Neaman, and Donald Scotts, the clarinettists Philip Michel and David Sheppard, and the cellists Jo Cole and Timothy Hugh. He has held lecturing positions at the Portsmouth Polytechnic and the Victorian College of the Arts, and also taught piano performance at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. For Thames Publishing he has prepared a thirteen-volume Centenary Edition of vocal and keyboard music by E.J. Moeran. He was Artistic Adviser to the 1994 Tudeley Festival, which celebrated the centenary of Moeran’s birth; and for a season he was engaged as Musical Director at the English Theatre in Hamburg. As a Recordings Producer for the British Music Society, of which he is also the current Chairman and Recordings Manager, John Talbot has overseen a number of major recording projects in the process of creating the Society’s significant catalogue of sound recordings over the last two decades. He has recorded for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and his commercial discography includes, for Chandos, Moeran’s Violin Sonata with Donald Scotts.