Judith Lambden

Judith was born in Creswick, Victoria. She graduated from the Melbourne University Conservatorium with a B.Mus (Hons) degree and remained in Melbourne for a further seven years, studying piano with Gordon McKeown and theory and composition with John Ingram. She won many prizes and gave national broadcast performances for ABC radio.

Awarded the Clarke Scholarship for three years at the Royal College of Music, she travelled to London. In her final year she won the Hopkinson Gold Medal and the Norris Prize. She then studied harpsichord in Siena with Ruggiero Gerlin, a pupil and long associate of Wanda Landowska.

She also worked with leading pianists and pedagogues including Kendall Taylor, Lamar Crowson, Nadia Boulanger and Paul Badura-Skoda, and later held a Dutch Government grant for a year of study with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam. Able to play a substantial body of Bach’s keyboard works and other repertoire from memory, she gave many recitals in England, where she lived for 23 years, and throughout Europe. She broadcast for the BBC and Radio Hilversum; recital venues included the Universities of Oxford, Durham, Colchester, Leicester, Surrey and London. As harpsichordist she played and recorded with the Dolmetsch Ensemble. She performed under Sir Adrian Boult and Sir Malcolm Sargent. In Paris she accompanied Telemann flute sonatas with Sir James Galway, then a student of Jean-Pierre Rampal, and also appeared with British flautists including Leonard Paice and Andrew Day.

Since returning to Australia she has played the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Camberwell Camerata and given solo piano recitals, including two at the Castlemaine Festival. As harpsichordist with Il Sole Barocco she has toured widely and appeared at Monash University. She taught at the Victorian College of the Arts and other tertiary institutions, became an AMEB examiner in 1985, assessed for VCAA, and has adjudicated at more than sixty eisteddfodau throughout Australia.