Otis Beasley is a British pianist. Born in Devon, England, he took his first piano lessons at the age of six with Christopher Fletcher and gained a scholarship at eleven to attend Wells Cathedral School as a specialist musician. Studying with John Byrne, he obtained his DipABRSM at sixteen with Distinction, and at seventeen was a piano finalist of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition.

 

After joining the Royal College of Music in London as a Foundation Scholar, he studied with John Byrne, Ruth Nye and Gordon Fergus-Thompson, toured the United Emirate States as a BBC Young Musician, and won the Hastings International Piano Concerto competition before graduating with First-Class Honours. He later completed an Intensive Masters in Performance and Research programme at the Royal Academy of Music in London with Distinction, studying with Ian Fountain and winning the Harold Samuel Bach Prize. He has participated in masterclasses with musicians such as Kristian Bezuidenhout, Nikolai Demidenko, Sergei Dorensky, Andrzej Jasiński and Menahem Pressler, performed works by Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Rachmaninoff with orchestras in the UK, Romania and Italy, and given solo recitals in the UK, Germany and Hungary.

 

His PhD, undertaken at the Royal Academy of Music and supervised by Dr Sarah Callis, focuses on the music of Fryderyk Chopin and was partially supported by a scholarship from the Drake Calleja Trust. In 2023, he presented a paper drawing from his doctoral research at a musicological conference organised by the Chopin Institute in Warsaw.

 

While based in London, he was a visiting music teacher at St Paul’s School, Winchester College and Trinity School; he also gave individual keyboard skills lessons at the Royal Academy of Music together with various lectures there for postgraduate pianists. He moved to Cologne in 2021 and joined the G. F. Handel Music Academy’s teaching team in 2024. He also teaches at the Musikschule ‘Das Ohr’ in Cologne’s Severinsviertel.