Jocelyn Freeman

Welsh-born collaborative pianist Jocelyn Freeman has championed Welsh composers and contemporary music in addition to the standard repertory. She has recorded for Orchid Classics, Rubicon, and other labels. Freeman attended the Royal Academy of Music in London from 2004 to 2008, earning a bachelor's degree with honors in piano performance. Specializing then in piano accompaniment, she went on for a master's degree at the same institution, graduating with distinction in 2011. In 2008, she began serving as a piano teacher at Orchard House School in London, also working as a freelance pianist and vocal coach. From 2010 to 2016, Freeman served as director of music at London's Stoke Newington Methodist Church, and she was accompanist and assistant director for the Esterhazy Singers and the London Pro Arte Singers from 2011 to 2016. From 2012 to 2014, she was a Junior Fellow at London's Royal College of Music. In 2012, Freeman released the solo album Night and Novelties on the Kissan Productions label. In 2018, she backed soprano Elin Manahan Thomas on the album Mae Hiraeth yn y Môr on the Ty Cerdd label, following that up by backing Katharine Dain on Song / Lied / Cân on the same label in 2019. Freeman has appeared at London's Wigmore Hall and Royal Albert Hall, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, and the Sage Gateshead cultural center. She has been heard on radio broadcasts in Britain and Germany. Freeman's collaborators, in addition to Thomas and Dain, include Fleur Barron, Gareth Brynmor John, Stuart Jackson, and Julien Van Mellaerts. Her repertory includes standard piano concertos as a soloist; as an accompanist, she plays traditional song repertory, Welsh composers such as Dilys Elwyn-Edwards and Morfydd Owen, and contemporary composers, including James MacMillan and Judith Weir. Freeman backed Jackson in 2020 on the song recital Flax and Fire: Songs of Devotion on the Orchid Classics label. She returned in 2023 as accompanist on The Poet's Echo, a recital of songs to texts by Pushkin, on the Rubicon label.
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