Daniel-Ben Pienaar was born in South Africa and came to public notice at the age of fourteen, performing Liszt's Concerto in E-flat major. He was educated at the Royal Academy of Music in London where he was a winner of the Queen's Commendation. He is now Curzon Lecturer in Performance Studies at the Academy and combines his teaching activities with recording projects and concerts.

Pienaar's international recital appearances include performances of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. His solo discography comprises both books of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, the Chopin Ballades, the first complete recording of the keyboard music of Orlando Gibbons, Mozart's complete Piano Sonatas (one of the top five Sunday Times recommendations for 2011), Bach's Goldberg Variations and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations.

 Future plans for the studio include returning to the Schubert Sonatas and Bach Partitas. His chamber music collaborations include three previous recordings for Linn of mainly seventeenth and nineteenth-century music in his own arrangements for trumpet and piano, with Jonathan Freeman-Attwood. As producer he has been involved in a number of recordings for the Royal Academy of Music's in-house label.