Ever since Kit Armstrong entered the international music stage twenty years ago, his activities have exerted an enduring fascination upon music lovers. He performs recitals in major international series, appears with the world’s finest orchestras, and has developed close artistic partnerships with leading instrumentalists and vocalists. He has held artist-in-residence appointments incorporating a wide spectrum of musical formats, which allow him to combine his roles as composer, pianist, conductor, and organist. In 2024, he leads the Expedition Mozart, a concert tour featuring Mozart’s music of various genres with an international group of distinguished chamber musicians and soloists, performing in some of Europe’s most prestigious festivals and venues.
Armstrong came to classical music through composition at the age of five. He has since created a broad oeuvre of vocal, instrumental, chamber, and symphonic works, many of which have been commissioned by notable European cultural institutions. His compositions are published by Edition Peters.
Armstrong’s solo piano recordings include the albums Bach, Ligeti, Armstrong (2013) and Liszt: Symphonic Scenes (2016) on Sony Classical, as well as various live recitals on DVD, such as Bach’s Goldberg Variations and its Predecessors at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam (Unitel, 2017), Wagner – Liszt – Mozart at the Bayreuth Margravial Opera House (C-Major, 2019), and 1520-2020: A Musical Odyssey (Damis Films, 2023). In 2021 Deutsche Grammophon released a double CD dedicated to a panorama of works by William Byrd and John Bull: The Visionaries of Piano Music, and in 2023 Mozart’s violin sonatas with Renaud Capuçon.
Born in 1992 in California, USA, Armstrong studied physics at California State University, later chemistry and mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania and mathematics at Imperial College London. Alfred Brendel has guided Armstrong as a musical mentor since 2005. In 2008, he earned a bachelor’s degree in music at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and in 2012 a master’s degree in pure mathematics at the University of Paris VI.
In 2012, Kit Armstrong purchased the Church of Sainte-Thérèse in Hirson, France, and transformed it into a hall for concerts and exhibitions. This cultural centre has become home to interdisciplinary projects reaching a regional as well as cosmopolitan public, and has been the subject of profiles in the national and international press.
