Elizabeth Kenny

Elizabeth Kenny, an English lutenist and theorbo player often called Liz, maintains an integrated practice in which virtuoso performance, pedagogy, and scholarly inquiry reinforce one another. She has appeared with leading period-instrument groups including Les Arts Florissants and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, while holding teaching posts at the Royal Academy of Music and at additional conservatories across Britain and overseas. Her extensive discography encompasses the 2024 release De Pasión Mortal: Songs from Two Golden Ages.

Kenny began on classical guitar during childhood; as she explained to the Night Shift, “I got in trouble in primary school, messing about because I was bored, so my parents bought me a guitar to keep me occupied.” Although she did not pursue a music degree at university, she resolved after graduation to test her abilities and first studied guitar under Robert Lewin before changing to lute with Nigel North, whose expertise in continuo practice complemented his own accomplished playing.

The move proved advantageous during the early-1990s recession that curtailed British arts funding; Kenny relocated to Paris and secured a position with William Christie’s pioneering ensemble Les Arts Florissants. While the Baroque era, particularly its less standardized English manifestations, has constituted her principal terrain, she has also embraced Renaissance repertoire. She remained with Les Arts Florissants from 1992 to 2007, then performed with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from 2007 to 2015, contributing numerous recordings to both organizations and sustaining ongoing projects with each. Additional credits include continuo work for singers such as Ian Bostridge; her first solo appearance supported countertenor Robin Blaze on the 2000 Hyperion album English Lute Songs.

Kenny’s independent recordings foreground rarely heard repertory yet stand out for technical brilliance rather than mere specialization. With her ensemble Theatre of the Ayre she has issued several Linn titles, among them the Wigmore Hall Live recording of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis. In 2017 she released The Masque of Moments, an anthology of seventeenth-century English masque music that originated in an earlier Theatre of the Ayre touring production. Further Linn projects include Ars Longa: Old and New Music for the Theorbo (2019). Following a pandemic-related hiatus she returned to the label in 2024 with De Pasión Mortal: Songs from Two Golden Ages. As professor at the Royal Academy of Music she has also instructed at the University of Southampton and the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, once assembling 360 young ukulele players to explore links between early music and the blues.