I was brought up in Dorset, played the piano as a child and won both music and academic scholarships to Canford School. I went on to study theology as a Scholar at St. John’s College Cambridge and was heading in an academic direction before deciding to change course and pursue music as a career.

Winning a scholarship to study as a postgraduate at Trinity College of Music, I worked with the Hungarian pianist Joseph Weingarten, himself a student of Dohnányi, Bartók and Kodály, and the British pianist Christine Croshaw. As I began to play professionally, other major influences were the pianist, teacher and coach Martin Isepp, formerly Head of Music at Glyndebourne, who was very important in shaping my approach to art song, and the Hungarian violin pedagogue Béla Katona.

I was fortunate enough both to study and subsequently to work at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh and held positions as staff pianist and vocal coach at Trinity College of Music and as a staff accompanist in the string department of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for many years.

I’ve always worked with singers and have a particular love for the song repertoire. Keenly interested in vocal training, I’ve played for many singing teachers over the years – I learnt most from the Italian teacher Iris dell’Acqua, whose students I played for and coached for the better part of a decade. That interest led to a very busy practice as a vocal coach with many students now pursuing successful careers.

Although music for voice and piano has been a consistent strand I’ve also performed as a soloist and a chamber musician. Music has taken me all over the world, with concerts in many European countries and several trips to China, where I gave masterclasses, solo and song recitals and two performances of Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande in the Forbidden City concert hall in Beijing.

In recent years I’ve become more and more interested in music making closer to my home in East Sussex, convinced that if classical musicians are unable to put down strong roots in their own towns, villages and communities then, in the absence of strong support for the arts from the state, we’re in danger of losing something very precious. I give frequent local performances, play the piano for a number of local choirs and ran a chamber music series in my village for many years. All these activities come into focus in the Music Box Wealden project.