Susan Tomes has won awards for her playing, for her recordings and for her writing. As a founder member of Domus, travelling in the 1980s with its own portable concert hall, she helped to pioneer a more inclusive approach to performing chamber music. As the pianist of The Florestan Trio she toured internationally for seventeen years and won a Royal Philharmonic Society award. In parallel with these activities she has been the pianist of The Gaudier Ensemble for over thirty years. She has been recording for Hyperion since 1985 when, as the pianist of Domus, she recorded a multi-award-winning disc of Fauré Piano Quartets. Altogether she has made over fifty CDs, not only chamber music but also Mozart Piano Concertos and the ‘syncopated’ music of Billy Mayerl. Many of these discs won awards in the UK, France and Germany and went on to become benchmark recordings. In 2013 she was awarded the Cobbett Medal for her contribution to chamber music.

Susan is also the author of eight books about her experience as a performer and her deep engagement with music. Her books have been widely acclaimed and she is a two-time winner of a Presto Music ‘Book of the Year’ award. In 2024 her book Women and the Piano, together with a series of concerts of this repertoire, brought the history of female pianism to the attention of a wider audience. Her most recent book, Nocturnes and the Fascination of Night Music, was published in 2026 to outstanding reviews.