UK JAZZ NEWS —
Gabriella Liandu Interview
Jazz At The Vache, Chalfont St Giles, Bucks, 5 September 2025
Baroque music specialists Vache Baroque will be hosting the first ever jazz evening at their summer festival. They have invited Zambian-Scottish vocalist Gabriella Liandu to curate a jazz evening with elements of baroque... Her response: “Let’s really go all the way with this!…” She will bring these two aspects of her training and career together in a brand new programme.
UK Jazz News:You have a new project, Echoes Of Ornament, which will have its first public outing on Friday 5 September as part of the Vache Baroque 2025 Festival. Tell us a little about the event.
Gabriella Liandu: Echoes of Ornament explores the kinship between two seemingly distant worlds and the timeless threads that connect early music and modern jazz across centuries…
“Yet Ex Cathedra also yielded up one soloist, the mezzo-soprano Gabriella Liandu, whose expressiveness and delicacy brought a quite sensational quality, and a magic to every passage that she sang.”
— Roderic Dunnett, Church Times
When a Child is a Witness
World première at Coventry Cathedral
Gabriella has been the soloist for three premier works by Ex Cathedra’s composer-in-residence, Liz Dilnot Johnson — Jerusalem/Blake Re-imagined Symphony Hall, May 2021, I Stand At The Door Town Hall, December 2021 and When a Child is a Witness Coventry Cathedral, February 2022 — and after premiering Dilnot Johnson’s latest work with the choir, she received a glowing review.
‘SONDER’
Gabriella Liandu’s film to première at Africa in Motion film festival
We are delighted to present two audiovisual commissions inspired by films from our music strand, Setting Pace. The musicians selected are Nova Scotia The Truth and Gabriella Liandu. Join us in celebrating these two young Black female artists, enjoy the world premieres of both pieces, and hear about their creative process. Head to the main website to watch the Q&A session with the artists about their inspiration and creative process.
“Gabriella was commissioned to make the film for the annual film festival, which typically takes place in Scotland, and will run online until 31 October this year. The objective of the AiM festival is to introduce Scottish audiences to African cinema, and to overcome the underrepresentation of African film in British film-going culture.”
From Bahrain to Birmingham
Gabriella Liandu, shares with Behnaz Sanjana her operatic endeavours as a student in the UK and fond memories of growing up in Bahrain.
Gabriella Liandu’s destiny panned out when she made it to the semi finals of the Young Musicians of the Gulf competition in 2016. “One of the adjudicators, John Thwaites, Head of Keyboard Studies at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC), suggested I audition at RBC,” she says. “Within two weeks I had been offered a place on the Vocal and Operatic course! So here I am, four years later, at the end of my undergraduate course.”