Ian Pace is a pianist of long-established reputation, specialising in the farthest reaches of musical modernism and transcendental virtuosity, as well as a writer and musicologist focusing on issues of performance, music and society and the avant-garde. He was born in Hartlepool, England, in 1968, and studied at Chetham's School of Music, The Queen's College, Oxford and, as a Fulbright Scholar, at the Juilliard School in New York. His main teacher, and a major influence upon his work, was the Hungarian pianist György Sándor, a student of Bartók.

Based in London since 1993, he has pursued an active international career, performing throughout Britain, Europe and the US. His absolutely vast repertoire of all periods focuses particularly upon music of the 20th and 21st Century, including a wide range of works by contemporary British, French, German and Italian and other composers as well as the "classics" of modern music by composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Barraqué, Xenakis, Ligeti, Nono, Kagel and Cage. He has given world premieres of over 100 pieces for solo piano, including works by Patrícia Almeida, Richard Barrett, Luc Brewaeys, William Brooks, Aaron Cassidy, James Clarke, James Dillon, Gordon Downie, Pascal Dusapin, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy (whose complete piano works he performed in a landmark 6-concert series in 1996), Christopher Fox, Volker Heyn, Wieland Hoban, Hilda Paredes, Alwynne Pritchard, Horatiu Radulescu, Lauren Redhead, Frederic Rzewski, Thoma Simaku, Howard Skempton, Gerhard Stäbler, Serge Verstockt, Jay Allan Yim and Walter Zimmermann. He is renowned for ambitious and ingenious programming, and for his ability to surmount the most transcendental of pianistic challenges. He has presented cycles of works including Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I-X, and the piano works of Ferneyhough, Fox, Kagel, Ligeti, Lachenmann, Messiaen, Radulescu, Rihm and Skempton. His many performances of the standard piano literature combine elements derived from historical performance research with a modernist perspective to produce often startingly original interpretations. In addition to his activities as a soloist, Ian is the Artistic Director of the ensemble Topologies and regularly plays with other soloists and groups, most notably the Arditti Quartet.

Ian has played in 22 countries and at most major European venues and festivals, including Festival D'Automne in Paris, Agora, IRCAM, Archipel, Geneva, Ars Musica in Brussels, International Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Berlin Biennale, Wien Modern, the International Music Festivals in Aldeburgh, Bath, Cheltenham, Huddersfield and Oxford, Nuovo Consonanza in Rome, Sonorities in Belfast, Warsaw Autumn and the International Bartók Festival in Szombathély. He is a regular piano professor at the impuls course at Graz. He has played with orchestras including the Orchestre de Paris under Christoph Eschenbach (with whom he premiered and recorded Pascal Dusapin’s piano concerto "À Quia"), the SWR Orchestra in Stuttgart, the Dortmund Philharmonic, and the Dutch Radio Kamer Filharmonie. Many of his recitals and recordings have been broadcasted, by British, French, Belgian, Dutch, German, Swiss, Austrian, Italian, Polish and Australian Radio. He has recorded numerous CD's on the Metier, Mode, Hat Art, NMC, Black Box, Albedo, Stradivarius and Naive labels, which have been received with great critical acclaim. In autumn 2013 his 5-CD set of Finnissy’s The History of Photography in Sound was released on Divine Art to huge critical praise.

He is also a prolific writer on music and musical issues, having published articles in many journals and various book chapters. He was co-editor of and a major contributor to the book Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy, published by Ashgate Ltd in 1997. His chapter on 19th-century instrumental music will appear in the Cambridge History of Musical Performance, edited Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell, published in February 2012, and his monograph Brahms Performance Practice: Documentary, Analytic and Interpretive Approaches will be published by Ashgate in 2012-2013. From 2003-2006 he was AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, where he wrote a new monograph on Michael Finnissy’s The History of Photography in Sound (which he premiered in 2001). In 2007 he was appointed Lecturer in Contemporary Musicologies at City University, London. His areas of academic expertise include 19th century performance practice (especially the work of Schumann, Liszt and Brahms), issues of music and society (with particular reference to the work of Adorno, the Frankfurt School, and their followers) and music and identity, contemporary performance practice and issues, music and culture under fascism, and the post-1945 avant-garde, especially that in West Germany.

He taught piano at the London College of Music and Media from 1998 to 2001, and has also taught at Trinity College of Music (where he was an artist-in-residence in 2006) and at the courses at Acanthes (2005) and impuls, Graz (2009, 2011). He has also given many masterclasses and workshops for composers, as well as guest lectures on a variety of subjects.