[2] They founded the virtuoso new music group Jane's Minstrels and many of Payne's works were premiered by Manning and the ensemble.
[3] She was educated at Norwich High School for Girls, the Royal Academy of Music (graduating LRAM in 1958), and the Scuola di Canto at Cureglia, Switzerland.
The group played music by Henry Purcell, Edward Elgar, Frank Bridge, Percy Grainger, Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg.
[10][11] In his preface to Manning's 65th birthday concert at Wigmore Hall in 2003, the British critic Bayan Northcott wrote: It was an inspired choice to present Jane Manning as Miss Donnithorne, not only because she is an artist of astonishing gift but because she is also one of the greatest performers of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, and in her performance of the Maxwell Davies, the two pieces are palpably linked....
[7] Richard Rodney Bennett's choral work Spells was written for her,[12] as was Matthew King's The Snow Queen (1992).
Whether she's faced with the pure angular leaps of Anton Webern, the throaty suggestiveness of Schoenberg or the black, crazed humour of György Ligeti, Jane Manning is always equal to the task.
[14] Her world premieres include the role of Max in Oliver Knussen's Where the Wild Things Are (1980), Kavita I, II and III (1970/72) by Naresh Sohal, and Night's Poet (1971) by the same composer.
[2] Payne's colleague and fellow composer Colin Matthews noted that "They were inseparable in life, and I suppose it's not a surprise that he would follow her so soon after".