Neil Brand

Neil Brand has been a silent film accompanist for over 30 years, regularly in London at the Barbican and BFI National Film Theatres, throughout the UK and at film festivals around the world, including Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Ukraine, throughout Europe and, in Italy, the Bologna, Aosta, Bergamo and Pordenone festivals where he has inaugurated the School of Music and Image to teach up-and-coming young pianists about silent film accompaniment.  

Neil now has a very fruitful relationship with the BBC Symphony Orchestra which has resulted in London performances of his acclaimed orchestral score for Hitchcock’s silent Blackmail (commissioned by Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna), the BBCSO / Barbican commission to score Asquith’s silent Underground, (released to great acclaim theatrically and on Blu-Ray/DVD by the BFI), Chaplin's Easy Street (released on DVD/Blu-Ray) and Fairbanks’s Robin Hood. He followed these successes with two through-scored radio adaptations, The Wind in the Willows (Audio Drama Award Nominated) and A Christmas Carol for Orchestra, Choir and Actors commissioned by Radios 3 and 4, performed live by the BBCSO and BBC Singers at Barbican Concert Hall at Christmas 2016 and elsewhere subsequently. His most recent scores are for Hitchcock's The Lodger, and Jackie Coogan’s Oliver Twist (premiered by Ben Palmer and the Covent Garden Symphonia). He is published by Faber Music.

Neil is also a prolific writer, particularly of radio drama, including the Sony Award-nominated Stan (which he subsequently adapted for BBC4 TV), the highly popular plays Joanna, Seeing the Joke, The Big Broadcast (starring Samantha Spiro and about to enter its fourth series) and his recent critically-acclaimed project The Haunting of MR James, starring Mark Gatiss. He is the author of many articles for Sight and Sound, BBC Magazines and other periodicals. 

Recently he has toured throughout the UK and abroad with his hilarious and touching one-man-show The Silent Pianist Speaks and shows about Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. Neil is well-known as a TV presenter on BBC4 with his hugely successful series' Sound of Cinema, The Music that Made the Movies (2013), Sound of Song (2015), Sound of Musicals (2017) and most recently the acclaimed Sound of Movie Musicals (2018). He is a regular presenter on Radio 4's Film Programme, a Fellow of Aberystwyth University and a Visiting Professor of the Royal Academy of Music, was awarded the BASCA Gold Badge in 2016 and is considered one of the finest improvising piano accompanists in the world.