Anna Markland

Anna Markland (born 23 May 1964) (also known as Anna Markland-Crookes and Anna Crookes) ) is an English soprano and pianist who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 1982, playing Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. She has featured in a long-term study of the lives of gifted children.

Education and early life
Markland grew up in a small house on a council estate in Liverpool. Her grandparents on each side had immigrated from Ireland to Liverpool, her father's side being "factory hands" and on her maternal great-grandparents concert musicians. Her grandmother graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in music at just 14 years old. She studied at Chetham's School of Music (1974–1983) with Heather Slade-Lipkin where she was encourage to play the piano. She achieved an ARCM diploma at the age of 17. In 1984, she won an instrumental scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford where she studied for a BA Honours degree in Music while continuing her piano performance schedule, also singing with the choir or Worcester College and with Schola Cantorum of Oxford. This was followed by two years' postgraduate piano study with Philip Fowke and vocal study with Kenneth Bowen at the Royal Academy of Music.

After two years of study at the Royal College of Music, she had to give up playing the piano due to health issues with her arms.

Pianist
In 1982, Markland was the first female and pianist to win the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. She has performed with several British orchestras including the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

She has accompanied vocalists including Roderick Williams, James Gilchrist, Paul Agnew, Nicholas Mulroy, Matthew Brook, and Clare Wilkinson. She has also accompanied the vocal ensemble I Fagiolini.

Markland has run Masterclasses for schools, including at Monkton Combe School near Bath in 1998.

Soprano
In 1986, while studying at Oxford, Markland became a founding member of the vocal ensemble I Fagiolini. She subsequently toured and recorded extensively with the group, which specialises in Renaissance and contemporary music and has received a number of awards.

She is a founding member of Tenebrae, The Finzi Singers and the Britten Sinfonia Voices, and has performed with The Sixteen, The Monteverdi Choir, The Dunedin Consort, Trinity Baroque, Les Arts Florissants, La Grande Chapelle, The Scholars’ Baroque Ensemble, Pixels Ensemble and the BBC Singers.

Radio and television
Markland appeared throughout the 1982 BBC Young Musician of the Year series and in subsequent years as an interviewed guest in 1984 and as a judge in 2010 for the keyboards category final. She was interviewed on BBC World Service's Meridian shortly after winning the competition, she was the subject of a BBC documentary feature on past competition winners in 1984, twice again in 1986, and then in 1988.

She presented a series of BBC Radio 3’s Young Artists’ Forum highlights in 1995.

On the subject of gifted children, she was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour programme in September 2010 and in I was a Child Prodigy (2008).

She has performed live on BBC Radio 3's In Tune in April 2016.