“That girl is one Rolls Royce pianist: what she can’t do with a Steinway is not worth doing.”
– audition candidate for Greek (Mark Anthony Turnage)
Lindy Tennent-Brown is a multi-skilled and versatile professional pianist, vocal coach, and music director. After more than two decades working as a successful freelance musician in London, she returned to New Zealand in late 2020.
Lindy holds the position of Professional Teaching Fellow at the University of Auckland’s School of Music, where she coaches postgraduate singers. She is in demand as an adjudicator for both piano and voice competitions, and leads masterclasses for singers and pianists at the University of Waikato. She performs frequently as continuo and orchestral keyboard player with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. In June 2022 Lindy returned to London as répétiteur for The Blue Woman, a new opera by Laura Bowler and Laura Lomas, directed by Katie Mitchell, for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
Lindy trained as a pianist and linguist at Victoria University of Wellington. At Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music she studied with the pre-eminent British pianist, Margaret Fingerhut, and won all the available prizes for accompaniment and répétiteur work. She held the RNCM Junior Fellowship in Accompaniment 2000-01 and graduated with the RNCM’s highest accolade, the prestigious Professional Performance Diploma. In 2001-03 she held the Legal & General Junior Fellowship in Piano at the Royal College of Music in London, where she studied with John Blakely. Lindy won the NZ National Piano Competition at Kerikeri in 2000 and toured as a soloist for Chamber Music NZ in 2001.
Lindy was mentored as a coaching accompanist by Malcolm Martineau and Roger Vignoles at the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, and has established herself internationally as one of the finest collaborative pianists of her generation. She was the only pianist invited to become an inaugural Wigmore Young Artist, and made her début at Wigmore Hall in 2004 partnering the great Irish mezzo, Anne Murray, DBE. Subsequent performances at Wigmore Hall and throughout Europe and the Americas followed: chamber music with the Royal, Elias, and Belcea String Quartets, Michael Collins, Isabelle van Keulen, and Roger Vignoles; song recitals with Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Robert Murray, Wendy Dawn Thompson, and Simon Keenlyside among very many others. Lindy has recorded extensively for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM), and has recorded and broadcast for BBC Radio 3.
Lindy has worked as music staff (répétiteur, vocal coach) for The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, English National Opera, Scottish Opera, Aldeburgh Productions, Glyndebourne Productions, English Touring Opera, and Opera Holland Park, with many of the great conductors and directors of our time: Tim Albery, Benedict Andrews, Richard Farnes, James Macdonald, James Macmillan, Garry Walker, and Simone Young, among others.
Lindy worked on the development of new opera for ROH2 (the Royal Opera’s new work development department) 2005-12, co-leading skills development workshops with composers and librettists interested in writing opera. Lindy was the founding music director of EXPOSURE, a sold-out contemporary opera scratch-night at the Linbury Studio Theatre, 2010-12. She has conducted world première seasons by Julian Philips, Evangelia Rigaki, and Oscar-winner Anne Dudley, and was music director of the critcially-acclaimed Bakkhai at the Almeida Theatre in 2015, featuring Ben Wishaw, Bertie Carvel and Kevin Harvey alongside ten extraordinary women singing new music by Orlando Gough, directed by James Macdonald.
Lindy has been engaged as a rehearsal, audition, and workshop pianist for music theatre in London’s West End, and has clocked up more than twenty keyboard one chairs as a deputy player across a wide variety of shows. She performed as part of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for Guys and Dolls at the Royal Albert Hall in 2018.
“And here’s the real reason it all worked: at the piano was a gifted professional who had the rare ability to understand every note and every word of the works she was accompanying, and the virtuoso skill to match every move and sound of her singers.
Her singers? Of course. She is Lindy Tennent-Brown….[the] designer of this performance. She turned the accompaniment into an ongoing duet, matching instrument and voice so that the qualities of the latter were constantly enhanced and, as a result, the concert into a top, and most appropriate, festival gig.”
Lindy Tennent-Brown 