Biography

Anna Tilbrook is one of Britain’s most exciting pianists, with a considerable reputation in song recitals and chamber music. She made her debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1999 and has since become a regular performer at Europe’s major concert halls and festivals.

Anna has collaborated with many leading singers and instrumentalists including James Gilchrist, Lucy Crowe, Mary Bevan, Sophie Bevan, Barbara Hannigan, Willard White, Ashley Riches, Sir John Tomlinson, Roderick Williams, Matthew Rose, Ian Bostridge, Barbara Bonney, Christine Rice, Iestyn Davies, Natalie Clein, Guy Johnston, Sol Gabetta, Michael Collins, Nick Daniel, Emily Sun, Philip Dukes, Louisa Tuck, Jack Liebeck, Chloe Hanslip, Ben Goldscheider and Jess Gillam. For Welsh National Opera she has accompanied Angela Gheorghiu, Jose Carreras and Bryn Terfel in televised concerts.

Performance highlights have included recitals in Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall, New York with Lucy Crowe, Wigmore Hall, deSingel Antwerp, Athénée theatre, Paris, Opera National du Rhin, the Anima Mundi festival in Pisa, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Musee des Tissus Lyon, Wroclaw Cantans NOSPR Katowice and appearances at the Edinburgh, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Oxford Lieder, Leeds Lieder, Jersey Liberation and West Cork Chamber Music Festivals.

With the distinguished British tenor James Gilchrist she has made acclaimed recordings of 20th-century English song for Linn records, including Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge (a finalist in the Gramophone Awards 2008), the cycles for tenor and piano by Gerald Finzi, song cycles by Benjamin Britten and Robert Schumann and for Chandos, a disc of Songs by Lennox Berkeley, the Songs and Chamber Music of Vaughan Williams with Philip Dukes, songs by Roger Quilter and Solitude, settings works by Purcell, Schubert, Barber and Jonathan Dove.

In 2009 they embarked on a series of recordings for Orchid records of the Schubert Song Cycles and their disc of Die Schone Mullerin received great critical acclaim and was Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, November 2009. Schubert’s Schwanengesang along with Beethoven’s An die Ferne Geliebte was released early in 2011 and their recording of Winterreise was Record of the week in The Independent and was made recording of the month in the 2011 Christmas issue of BBC Music Magazine – “It is a profoundly considered reading, considered enough for some of the songs to be as penetrating as in almost any performance I have heard.” (Michael Tanner).

In 2021, Lucy Crowe and Anna released their disc “Longing” featuring Strauss’s Four Last Songs along with other songs by Strauss, Berg and Schoenberg.

With String Quartets such as the Carducci, Fitzwilliam, Elias, Coull, Navarra  and Sacconi, she has performed a wide range of chamber music from Mozart’s Piano Concertos K414 and K415 to the Piano Quartets and Quintets of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Shostakovich, Brahms, Elgar, Bridge and Fauré.

Anna regularly broadcasts for Radio 3 and has also curated a number of series of concerts for them including in 2017 marking Hull as City of Culture with James Gilchrist and the Sacconi Quartet and in April 2018 a Big Chamber Day at Saffron Hall entitled ‘Tchaikovsky and his world’ featuring singers Anush Hovhannisyan, Caitlin Hulcup, Alessandro Fisher and Ashley Riches. Anna also curated the JAM on the Marsh festival in Kent in 2021 and 2022.

In 2023 Anna was invited to sit on the jury for the Cardiff Singer of the World Song Prize. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in May 2025.