Widely considered one of the finest British pianists of the 20th century, John Ogdon brought a demonic intensity and virtuoso ease to a wide range of music. His phenomenal sight-reading ability enabled him to learn large-scale and highly complex works at extraordinary speed. Born in Nottinghamshire in 1937, he studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, where he was a driving force in the propagation of new music by fellow students, including Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies. A champion of little-known composers old and new, and a diffident workaholic with a voracious appetite for learning, he was more easily exploited than understood. Ogdon won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in 1962 (jointly with Vladimir Ashkenazy), which rapidly launched an international career. His recorded legacy testifies to an astonishing breadth—nearly 80 composers, encompassing personal passions and 20th-century byways. He thrived on thorny difficulty, whether in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata (1818), Alkan’s Concerto for Solo Piano (1857) or Sorabji’s epic Opus Clavicembalisticum (1930). Ogdon was also the composer of more than 200 works, mostly for piano but also including operas, cantatas, songs and chamber music. A mental breakdown in 1973 and subsequent treatment cast a long shadow over Ogdon’s later career, during which his playing could veer alarmingly in and out of focus,