Biography
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downloadable for concerts)
Like many lute players, Liz Kenny started out by playing the classical guitar. As a junior at the Royal Academy of Music she received intelligent guidance from Michael Lewin (now a colleague there) and came within reach of London concert life. Her first encounter with the lute was hearing a performance by Nigel North - later to be an inspiring teacher. After going down the byways of an English degree and back to the guitar, she returned to this sound. Discovering everything from the subtle feeling of playing on double strung lutes to the freedom of improvisation that playing continuo offered was an exhilarating and at times frustrating experience. Just as well she didn't know at the outset that playing the lute for a living would entail mastering and giving houseroom to a dozen different instruments …
Liz
with Pat O'Brien
(click on the picture for a large image)
Now her repertoire extends from the early 16th century through the domain of the theorbo and baroque lute to the 19th century, thanks to stumbling across a beautiful small French romantic guitar at a London dealer's.
Her career has always had a strong international bias since it began during the recession in the UK in the early 90s. She went to Paris instead and began a long association with William Christie's Les Arts Florissants, which has had a big influence on her performing style. Playing with an unusually diverse range of ensembles in France, Germany and the USA as well as at home has given her a wide perspective on different ways of making music. She is now committed to drawing on this in devising her own programmes. Groups she has appeared with regularly in over a decade of touring include Les Arts Florissants, Concerto Vocale, The English Concert, Tragicomedia, Teatro Lirico, Tira mi sú, The Gabrieli Consort, The Taverner Consort, The Parley of Instruments, The King's Consort, The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Concordia.
She's taken the same approach to teaching, finding out about the German as well as the English conservatoire system in two years teaching at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. Now lute professor at the Royal Academy of music, she's involved in a number of chamber music and performance practice projects there.
Teaching
in New York
(click on the picture for a large image)
Biography for concert promoters
Elizabeth Kenny has a solo repertoire ranging from the renaissance to the eighteenth century. She is a principal player in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and regularly appears with other leading period instrument groups.
She has been a regular part of William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants since 1993, and has made dozens of recordings for CD, radio and television as well as touring throughout Europe, the USA and Japan.
She plays renaissance music with the viol consorts Concordia (UK) and L’Ensemble Orlando Gibbons (France). Her special interest in the literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has led her to create themed programmes with recital partners including Mark Padmore, Robin Blaze, and James Bowman.
Recommended without reservation … one of the most outstanding recitals of its kind on disc. BBC Music Magazine (‘English Lute Songs’, with Robin Blaze)
She studied guitar with Michael Lewin and lute with Nigel North. Robert Spencer and Pat O’Brien gave her advice and inspiration. She spent two years teaching at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, and is now professor of lute at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 2003 she introduced the Spencer collection of music, books and instruments to the public by devising a series of lectures and concerts culminating in a fully staged Elizabethan entertainment, which she directed for the City of London Festival. In 2004-5 she produced a tour of newly-edited works by Charpentier which were written for the Grand Dauphin, heir to Louis XIV, for an unusual ensemble of voices, recorders and continuo.
Most recently Elizabeth Kenny has been awarded one of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Fellowships in the creative and performing arts. The fellowship at Southampton University will enable her to pursue a three year project reassessing the history of seventeenth century English song through performances and published papers.
Elizabeth Kenny was delightful in Vivaldi’s Lute Concerto in D… The Independent, December 2004
Elizabeth Kenny … accompanied them exquisitely … [and] improvised an almost indecently beautiful variation on the song. Toronto National Post, February 2001
Liz Kenny took the bull by the horns…playing with ease difficult works…the
programme was ingeniously devised. Lute Society Magazine September 2003