Mr Jonathan Darnborough

Director of Studies in Music

Biography

Jonathan Darnborough studied composition with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and studied the piano with Phyllis Sellick.  He was a postgraduate student at the Royal Northern College of Music, studying composition with Anthony Gilbert and piano with Derrick Wyndham, and was awarded a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Composition.  He subsequently studied the piano with Roger Woodward and Phyllis Sellick and he now pursues a career as a composer, pianist and lecturer.

Jonathan Darnborough has written orchestral, choral, chamber and solo instrumental works.  He is particularly interested in writing for voices and has written numerous songs and several musicals.  He is currently working on an opera based on Euripides’s Hecuba.  His 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".  He was a prizewinner in the 1992 Franco-Italian Music Competition in Paris and his recital work abroad has taken him to Europe, the USA and Indonesia.  He has wide ranging recital and concerto repertoires.

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 recorded a CD of songs by Elgar and Vaughan Williams, on the Claudio Bohema label, including Sea Pictures in Elgar's recital version for voice and piano.

Jonathan Darnborough is the author of an online course, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro which  was written for AllLearn, a partnership between Oxford, Stanford and Yale universities. He is currently writing an online course on musical analysis for the OUDCE.