John Sweeney

PIANO

John Sweeney has played for silent film since 1990, starting at Riverside Studios in London and subsequently playing at many venues in Britain including the National Film Theatre, the Barbican Cinema, Broadway in Nottingham, the Imperial War Museum, and Watershed in Bristol. He has played for the British Silent Cinema Festival since its inception and has since 2000 been a regular pianist at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy.

He is a regular performer at the Slapstick Festival of silent comedy in Bristol, and has also played at other festivals in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Slovenia. He has recorded DVDs for the BFI, Cineteca di Bologna, and Edition Filmmuseum, as well as recording a soundtrack for Hitchcock's 'Downhill' for broadcast on Sky TV. He has played the Hitchcock silents at the Shanghai International Film Festival, and in Istanbul, Hong Kong, Moscow, Taiwan and Kazakhstan . He is one of the founders of the Kennington Bioscope doing regular screenings of neglected silent films at the Cinema Museum London with live music.

John has recently written a score for the DVD release of Lois Weber’s 1916 film The Dumb Girl of Portici, and also recorded a piano score for A Couple of Down and Outs. In 2018 he composed and performed a score for the London Film Festival Archive Gala, The Great Victorian Picture Show, which he subsequently performed at MOMA in New York and at the CInema Ritrovato festival in Italy. Recently he has performed at festivals in Istanbul, Zürich, Tromso, Weimar and Vilnius.