Anna Picard, London Music Critic, Dies of Cancer

Anna Picard, classical music critic of the Independent on Sunday from 2000 to 2013 and later Head of Communications and Repertoire Consultant at Opera Holland Park, has died of cancer.

Slippedisc, which reported the death, had offered her a position after the Independent on Sunday closed. She considered the offer for a while, the site notes, but ultimately remained a freelance writer. The announcement describes her as "a perceptive critic and excellent writer, a very private person."

Picard studied at the Royal Academy of Music and with Dr Thomas Lo Monaco in New York. She worked in early music before moving into journalism. Her 13-year run at the Independent on Sunday made her one of the defining newspaper voices on classical music in London during that period. In 2013, the year the paper's standalone fate was sealed, she joined The Times.

She wrote regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and appeared on BBC Radio Three's Record Review. In 2017 she joined Opera Holland Park as research and repertoire consultant, where she led the company's programme of talks and panel discussions — a role that expanded into her communications and repertoire remit in later years.

Picard also served as a juror for the International Opera Awards, the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards and the Leopold Mozart Violin Competition. Her scholarly side showed in a contributed chapter on disease and materialism for the Overture Opera Guide to La Traviata — an essay that, in hindsight, reads as pointedly personal.

Under two years before her death, she posted a statement on Twitter that Slippedisc reproduced in full:

"I can't presume to speak for everyone who has a terminal illness but it has been incredibly distressing to see the discussion of a bill that seeks to alleviate suffering hijacked by those to whom it does not apply. So much public outrage over what should be a private choice."

The post, written while she was living with terminal illness, addressed the UK's assisted dying bill debate. Its closing line — "what should be a private choice" — sits uneasily beside Slippedisc's own description of her as "a very private person," a tension she seems to have accepted in order to speak at all.

Picard's career traced an unusual arc: conservatory training, performance in early music, then the critic's chair, then the other side of the fence at an opera company. Few writers moved so fluidly between reviewing repertoire and programming the talks around it. Her death removes a critic who wrote with precision about voices and orchestras and, at the end, with equal precision about her own mortality.