Born in Sydney to an Australian mother and a Sierra Leonean father, Tonya Lemoh began her piano studies at the age of five when the family moved to London. She continued piano lessons while living variously in Tasmania, Sydney, London and Sierra Leone, finally returning to Australia to enter the Sydney Conservatorium of Music at the age of seventeen. She holds a Master of Music degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and undergraduate/post graduate degrees from the Sydney Conservatorium. She is also a graduate of the Artist Diploma programme of the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. From 1999 to 2001 she was staff accompanist at The Boston Conservatory. Her teachers have included Professor John Damgaard, Michael Lewin, Richard Fields, Nicolai Evrov and En Pei Lin. Among numerous international awards, she won the Diplôme d’honneur at the 2002 International Grieg Piano Competition in Norway, with a special mention for her interpretation of Liszt, and first prize in the International Competition of Young Performers in Denmark in 2003. That year she became a member of the piano faculty at the University of Copenhagen.

Tonya Lemoh has performed concertos with orchestras in Denmark, Australia and Bulgaria. She is an avid chamber musician, and in 2002, with Professor Judith Ermert-Robe of the Koninklijk Conservatorium Gent, formed the Ermert-Lemoh Duo which has since performed numerous concerts in Denmark, Belgium and Germany and been enthusiastically received by critics and audiences alike. She is also a member of Ensemble Nordlys, one of Denmark’s most well-established young chamber ensembles, which has premiered more than sixty new works commissioned especially for the quartet. She has made solo recordings for Danish television, Denmark’s Radio, and ABC radio, Australia. Having released a solo album devoted to works by Chopin, Liszt, Griffes, Bentzon and Ginastera, she here makes her debut on Chandos.