I'm a Welsh academic, pianist, and writer. As a pianist I work primarily as a song accompanist; I also work collaboratively with instrumentalists. I've appeared in recitals across the UK as well as further afield, making my evening recital debut at London's Wigmore Hall in 2019, with baritone Dominic Sedgwick. Other performance highlights include recitals at the Barbican Hall, Kings Place, LSO St Luke's, Royal Overseas League House (with performers from Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Royal Shakespeare Company), and St Martin-in-the-Fields, London; the Holywell Music Room, Oxford; the Internationale Hugo-Wolf-Akademie, Stuttgart; and as part of the BBC Proms Plus Festival. I've made both live and recorded broadcasts for BBC Radio 3. I was awarded the Accompanist's Prize at the inaugural Grange Festival International Singing Competition 2017, and at the John Kerr English Song Award 2018. I have recently formed a new trio with Irish traditional musicians Úna Monaghan and Síle Denvir, drawing together piano; traditional Irish harp, concertina, and singing; and electronics. Building on and departing from traditional music and song, we explore tensions and common ground between Western classical traditions and Irish and Welsh traditional music, computer music, and noise.
As an academic and writer, I'm working on a new biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams for Reaktion Books. I've published articles, essays, and reviews for academic journals, professional concert programmes, and other fora. I worked as a research advisor for the Choir of St John's College Cambridge's critically-acclaimed disc, Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor, appearing in performance as part of the disc's launch, and writing the sleeve notes. Alongside work on my biography, I am also editing and writing chapters for an edited volume on Vaughan Williams for Cambridge University Press.
I enjoy sharing my research with a wide range of audiences, contributing to BBC Radio 3's BBC Proms and Music Matters programmes, and speaking at Festivals including the New Paths, Ludlow English Song, and Oxford Lieder Festivals (as part of a study day held in collaboration with the Oxford Song Network at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities). In 2020 I was guest speaker and research advisor for the Chamber Music Society of Philadelphia's song project, Emerging Voices: Song as Social Interaction.
I especially enjoy education work, and have taught at the University of Oxford (where I was appointed a Lecturer in Music while working on my doctorate), and at the University of Cambridge, where I spent three years as a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, and founded a Cambridge Song Festival, of which I am Artistic Director. I've also taught at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, where I trained first as a solo pianist and then a song accompanist, and where I was later a Fellow in Song Accompaniment. I am currently Lecturer and Director of Performance at the University of Birmingham.
For more information about my research, performance, and media expertise please consult my University of Birmingham profile.
To get in touch about collaborations and projects: please contact me on [email protected].