Composer/Pianist

Jonathan Darnborough studied the piano with Phyllis Sellick whilst a student at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied composition with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway. He took a postgraduate diploma at the Royal Northern College of Music - studying the piano with Derrick Wyndham and composition with Anthony Gilbert.  He subsequently studied the piano with Roger Woodward and Phyllis Sellick and now pursues a career as pianist, composer and lecturer.

Jonathan Darnborough's works have been performed in Britain, Europe and the USA, where the Boston Globe described him as having "a compositional voice that was unmistakably his own - harmonically daring yet shunning obscurity, ... both civilised and full of sap".

As a pianist he has been praised by the Musical Times for his "excellent performances" and "engaging virtuosity".  His work abroad has taken him to the USA, France, Holland, Java, Borneo, and Italy where, after a recital in Perugia, he was presented with the Medaglia dell' Università Italiana per Stranieri. He was a prizewinner in the 1992 Franco-Italian Music Competition in Paris.  He has wide ranging recital and concerto repertoires and is particularly noted for his interpretation of works by British composers.

He has always maintained an interest in the broader aspects of music - spiritual, philosophical and psychological - and this interest led to his giving a lecture in the series The View from Eternity: Perspectives on Faith and Time in Contemporary Thought at Regent's Park College, Oxford.

Jonathan Darnborough is married to the mezzo-soprano Claire-Louise Lucas.  They are noted exponents of British repertoire and have toured twice in the USA, performing and lecturing on British music in universities and colleges.  They have appeared in the Dame Myra Hess memorial concert series at the Chicago Cultural Center - a recital that was be broadcast on 98.7 WFMT-FM, Chicago's Fine Arts Station, and over 300 affiliated stations - and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

They have recently released a CD of songs by Elgar and Vaughan Williams, on the Claudio Bohema label.  The recording features a rare opportunity to hear Elgar's Sea Pictures in the recital version for voice and piano.  It was in this version that Dame Clara Butt, the work's dedicatee, gave the London premiere in 1899, with Elgar at the piano.

Jonathan Darnborough also lectures for Oxford University, where he is the Departmental Lecturer in Music at the Department for Continuing Education and a member of Kellogg College.  He is the author of an online course,  Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro for AllLearn, a partnership between Oxford, Stanford and Yale universities.

He is currently writing an opera based Euripides's Hecuba.