White studied at the Royal Academy of Music, graduating in 2007. He studied piano with Hamish Milne and Nicholas Walker, and piano accompaniment with Michael Dussek.[1][2]
White played piano concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, and Rachmaninow with the Orchestra of the City in London.[3] He played the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor by Camille Saint-Saëns at the Philharmonie Berlin in 2016.[4]
White premiered new music. On 17 July 2003, he played the first performance of Blue Medusa by John Casken, a piece for bassoon and piano commissioned by Rosemary Burton's parents for her birthday.[5] With the same bassoonist, he played in 2009 Phoenix Arising, written by Graham Waterhouse in memory of his father, the bassoonist William Waterhouse.[6]
In opera, White worked as repetiteur and conductor, including at the Frankfurt Opera and the English National Opera.[3] He was a Piano Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Centre in Massachusetts, assisting James Levine for Kurt Weill's Mahagonny, also appearing onstage as the pianist.[7] He was solo repetiteur at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2014[3] and has since been promoted to Stellvertretender Studienleiter (Deputy Director of Musical Studies).[8]
He arranged movements two to five of Gustav Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony for piano, based on Deryck Cooke's performing version.[9] In 2008, he made a recording, using the arrangement of the first movement by Ronald Stevenson which is also based on Cooke.[9] The recording was taken at Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, Hampstead,[10] and released in 2010.[9] Christopher Abbot summarized in The Fanfare in a detailed review: "His transcription is not merely evidence of a familiarity with the Mahlerian idiom; it is infused with a profound understanding of the importance of this work in the larger context of Mahler's symphonic journey."[9] White played the transcription for the Gustav Mahler Society UK in London on 17 January 2010.[7]
