
Dorothy Linell
Dorothy Linell gave her London recital début at the South Bank Centre’s Purcell Room as a winner of a national Young Artists’ Competition. Since then, she has played instruments ranging from baroque guitar to banjo in venues from Moscow to Memphis. Recordings and performances for international festivals, major concert halls and the opera theatre include work with James Bowman, Charles Brett, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Steven Rickards, Deller Consort, English National Opera, Glyndebourne Opera, Kathleen Battle, Arleen Auger, and Simon Rattle with the renowned City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. She has appeared alongside Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth at their Wavendon Festivals, with violinist Peter Fisher’s Chamber Ensemble of London, and was also privileged to perform with Peter at Sir John’s memorial concert. She played for Nigel Kennedy and the English Chamber Orchestra in Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” for TV and video and on several subsequent tours, including performances for members of the Royal Family at St James’s Palace. Broadcasts include portraying the lute-playing Mary Queen of Scots for a BBC TV documentary, incidental music for Channel 4’s two series on Queen Elizabeth I and King Henry VII, and even performing in a sewer for the “Candid Camera” spin-off show “Game For A Laugh”. She has performed in Words & Music programmes with Dame Judi Dench, recorded for Naxos AudioBooks alongside Sir Ian McKellen. She broadcast with James Bowman and the Chapel Royal Choir on Aled Jones’s BBC Radio 3 “The Choir” and Radio 4’s “Morning Service” as a “Musician Extra-Ordinary”—following in a tradition dating back to the fifteenth century of musicians employed on an occasional basis to perform with the monarch’s own musicians. In 2007 and 2008 she joined the Chapel Royal for the annual Ballroom Carol Concerts in Buckingham Palace, broadcast by Classic FM on Christmas Day, and in 2009 at Kensington Palace. Recent work took her to Scandinavia (including a broadcast at Hamlet’s Kronborg Castle), Israel, Lebanon and Ny Alesund, the world’s northernmost inhabited town. Dorothy performed on several transatlantic crossings aboard the legendary Cunard flagship QE2, and other work on cruise ships (for Fred Olsen) includes The Caribbean, Spitsbergen and Arctic Circle, North Cape, Adriatic, Baltic States, The Canaries and Cape Verde Islands.