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 such as Les Arts Florissants, Concordia and L'Ensemble Orlando Gibbons. 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, and she has recently been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship at Southampton University to enable her to pursue a three-year project reassessing the history of seventeenth-century English song through performance and published papers. The project's aim is to reassess a century of undervalued repertoire in the light of what can be discovered about how professional singers and players interpreted written texts that were mostly published for amateurs. With professional singers and players using Italianate methods of improvisation, a French feel for rhythm and sonority and an English interest in theatre, Liz Kenny has recreated the kind of cosmopolitan richness of sound that was available, and to break down some of the distinctions between lutesongs, dramatic recitatives and masque or opera performances.

Liz is also professor of lute at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 2003 introduced the Spencer collection of music, books and instruments to the public by devising a series of lectures and concerts. In 2004/5 she toured the newly-edited works of Charpentier written for the Grand Dauphin, heir to Louis XIV.

Liz's festival appearances have included Göttingen (with Carolyn Sansom and Robin Blaze), Swaledale and Buxton (with Robin Blaze), Lichfield (with Mark Levy) and the York Early Music Festival with Mark Padmore; a recital with James Gilchrist at the Center for English Music at Yale, and the Boston Early Music Festival with Carolyn Sampson.

This summer Liz took her programme of music from English courtly masques, with soloists Sophie Daneman, William Purefoy, James Gilchrist and Roderick Williams/Stephan Loges to festivals at Aldeburgh, Spitalfields, Potsdam Sanssouci and Cheltenham.

www.elizabethkenny.co.uk

Programmes

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