Music & Tapas with Pianist James Longford

About

Join us at The Garlic Farm Restaurant for our monthly tapas & music evenings. We are very pleased to be hosting a series of visiting professional musicians for recitals throughout 2025 in collaboration with Wight Proms Wednesdays.

The restaurant will be open from 6pm serving a tapas menu until 7.30pm with 40 minute recital starting at 7.45pm. The bar will be open throughout.

"A very special, very beautiful sound..." Jury, International Schubert Competition

"Exquisitely detailed playing..." Birmingham Post

Happy playing in a variety of genres, James Longford's sensitive and scintillating musicality has endeared him to audiences all over the world – in venues such as Wigmore Hall, Royal Festival Hall, BBC Proms, Barbican, St.David's Hall, Aix-en-Provence and Anghiari Festivals, and Bregenzer Festspiele. He works with ENO, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, LSO, BBC SO, BBC Singers, Britten Sinfonia and the Heritage Orchestra, was a founder member of the groundbreaking orchestra Southbank Sinfonia, and has inspired the next generation of young composers in workshops with the Galos Piano Trio, whose latest recording of Clara Schumann and her contemporaries is out now.

Recent highlights include Music Director for Scottish Opera's Opera Highlights tour, playing to over 3000 audience members in eighteen venues, from the Cairngorms to Orkney and Skye; returning to Cunard's flagship Queen Mary 2 as a featured classical artist; and piano soloist in Britten's Young Apollo with Southbank Sinfonia.

Here on the Island James is a passionate educator and works with many local choirs, music festivals and education projects.

James won the Tagore Gold Medal at the Royal College of Music, and was organ scholar at St.Martin-in-the-Fields. A Junior Fellowship at the RCM followed, and residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, and at the Britten-Pears School. He became a Steinway Artist in 2014.