James Longford

Born and raised on the Isle of Wight, James Longford studied at the Royal College of Music in London, where he won the Tagore Gold Medal. He was organ scholar at St Martin-in-the-Fields, was awarded the first RCM Legal & General Junior Fellowship in 2000, and was the pianist for the groundbreaking orchestra Southbank Sinfonia in their inaugural year.

As a collaborative pianist, his work with a variety of singers, instrumentalists and ensembles has taken James to many major UK venues, including the Royal Opera, Barbican Hall, Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, English National Opera, Glyndebourne, Westminster Abbey, St David’s Hall Cardiff, Snape Maltings and the London Palladium; he has also performed abroad throughout Europe, the Middle East, the US and the Baltic States, and has broadcast on BBC Radio, most recently live on Radio 3 with Ann Murray and the Royal String Quartet. James was recently on the music staff for On the Rim of the World, a new opera by Orlando Gough – a six-month project which culminated in a performance by over 200 Kent primary school children and their parents on the main stage of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden.

James is one half of the acclaimed longfordbrown piano duo with New Zealand pianist Lindy Tennent-Brown. They are laureates of several major international competitions and are fast becoming one of the UK’s foremost two-piano teams, recently giving two acclaimed performances of Poulenc’s Concerto for two pianos at the Wiltshire Music Centre under Gerry Cornelius.