Scott Cantrell

Bryce Morrison has a history in Dallas.

Long London-based, the tall, lanky Englishman has become an influential figure in the piano world, as a teacher, critic and competition judge. This week, he's giving master classes to the young students of the Texas Conservatory for Young Artists at Collin College in Plano.

But it was as a young English professor, fresh out of Oxford, that he arrived at Southern Methodist University nearly 40 years ago.

"I taught all sorts of courses," he recalls, relaxing after coaching a student in a Beethoven sonata. "I had my dose of freshman English and an adult-education class every Tuesday night on the novel."

But his first love was the piano, which he began studying at age 5. And once ensconced at SMU, he learned that Alexander Uninsky, a Russian pianist prominent in the 1950s and '60s, was an artist-in-residence at the school.

After a couple of auditions, Uninsky agreed to take on the young Englishman as a pupil. As an SMU faculty member himself, Mr. Morrison was eligible for free tuition if he enrolled in a music-degree course alongside his own teaching duties.

"He was a very complicated man," Mr. Morrison recalls of Uninsky, who died in 1972. "Being Jewish, he'd seen his parents taken away by the Nazis, and he got out of Paris literally with minutes to spare. He managed to escape and get to Buenos Aires, and then all the way to New York, where he started his career again.

"He was an astonishing personality, very funny, with lots of laughs in class. He was very kind, very supportive, but also very critical."

Another powerful influence on Mr. Morrison was Louise Bianchi, who taught piano pedagogy at SMU and saw in him a natural piano teacher. With her encouragement, he decided to return to England, give up his career as an English professor and teach piano.

But his literary background, together with an analytical ear, also made him a natural as a music journalist. That side of his life's work began with writing a magazine article about the 1972 Leeds Piano Competition.

By the 1990s, Mr. Morrison had become an influential teacher and critic, lecturing and coaching students at London's Royal Academy of Music and elsewhere, writing for the London Times and other newspapers and music magazines, and supplying program notes for innumerable piano recordings. He continues to write for the record-review magazine Gramophone.

EVANS CAGLAGE/DMN

Piano teacher Bryce Morrison instructs Jimmy Du, 15, during a master class at Collin College as part of the Texas Conservatory for Young Artists program.

A fellow pianist in Uninsky's SMU class was a young Oklahoman named David Grice. Years later, when Mr. Grice, who died in April, and fellow pianist-teacher Sam Wong started the Texas Conservatory for Young Artists, they called on Mr. Morrison to serve as a guest teacher. This is his 11th summer participating in the course.

Along with several other prominent critics, Mr. Morrison got some unwelcome publicity two years ago over a big recordings hoax. After garnering lavish praise from Mr. Morrison and others, recordings promoted as the work of an obscure British pianist, Joyce Hatto, were revealed as pirated from CDs by numerous other pianists. The hoax was the work of her husband.

"People had a good go at us over that," Mr. Morrison says. "There were sniping comments about critics, about how they don't know anything.

"But the sound was altered radically from the original recordings. They played one of the Chopin-Godowsky études supposedly played by Joyce Hatto to Marc-André Hamelin and asked, 'What do you think of that?' He said, 'That's very good – she's something. But I don't approach it like that.' Then they told him it was his own recording.

"Mercifully, now, at least in England, this has died down. It's just terribly sad that her husband was willing to go to these lengths to cheat and lie," Mr. Morrison says.