“a very special, very beautiful sound…”
Jury, International Schubert Competition

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James Longford is a pianist, organist and vocal coach based on the beautiful Isle of Wight, on the UK’s south coast. He won the Tagore Gold Medal during his studies at the Royal College of Music, supported by the Countess of Munster Trust, and was organ scholar at St.Martin-in-the-Fields. After a Junior Fellowship at the RCM specialising in accompaniment, James held a Creative Artist Residency at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada. He is a laureate of several major competitions and was a semi-finalist in the Dranoff International Two Piano Competition in Miami, Florida. He was  selected as a Steinway Artist in 2014.
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James enjoys a wide-ranging career as a soloist, chamber musician and collaborative pianist, and enjoys programming unusual and entertaining works as well as new music, in venues such as Wigmore Hall, Royal Albert Hall, South Bank Centre, Barbican, St David's Hall Cardiff and Conway Hall. In 2012 he founded the Galos Piano Trio, who were recently ensemble-in-residence for an award-winning project for young composers in west Wales. Their second disc of works by Clara Schumann and her contemporaries Agnes Zimmermann and Louise Lebeau was released in 2020, available from Apple Music and other streaming platforms.

James works as a repetiteur with a number of organisations – Royal Opera House & Royal Ballet, English National Opera, BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Chorus, Opera North, London Concert Choir, Kokoro, Synergy Vocals, The Grange Festival, Heritage Orchestra, Royal Marines School of Music, Birmingham Opera Company, Garsington Opera and Bampton Classical Opera – and for the Hochschüle für Musik Weimar, Bregenzer Festspiele, Aix-en-Provence and Israel Festivals. Closer to home, he is a passionate educator and works with a number of local choirs, music festivals, universities and education projects in the south of England.