The Baroque Collective is an informal collective of acclaimed musicians - singers and instrumentalists - mainly based in the south of England. As individuals they perform nationally and internationally, as soloists and in ensembles such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Together they represent one of the greatest concentrations of  world-class musicians with a commitment to early, baroque and early classical music.

The Baroque Collective is coordinated by its directors, John Hancorn and Alison Bury, with the support of co-organisers Mike Dawney and Liz Webb.

The Baroque Collective includes Ruth Alford, Julia Bishop, Neil Brough, Abigail Brown, Alison Bury, Maggie Cole, Steven Devine, Richard Earle, James Ellis, Michael Fields, James Halliday, John Hancorn, Daire Halpin, Anna Holmes, Nick Houghton, Annette Isserlis, Elizabeth Kenny, Gillian Keith, Julian Podger, Andrew Roberts, Evelyn Tubb, Judy Tarling, Elin Manahan Thomas, Linda Turbett, Andrew Mackenzie Wicks, David Wright and many others.

Biographies

Ruth Alford (Cello)  has established herself as a well-respected chamber musician and continuo-cellist with many ensembles and chamber groups in London. She graduated from Manchester University with an honours degree in music and the Proctor Gregg Performance Award after studying cello there with Bernard Gregor-Smith and the Lindsay Quartet. Further studies followed at the Royal Academy of Music in London with David Strange, Amadeus Quartet, Sidney Griller, Jenny Ward-Clarke and also William Pleeth, whilst gaining performing experience in a wide variety of musical genres ranging from solo recitals to jazz and music theatre.

Indeed, Ruth still thrives on a broad musical diet from Baroque to Contemporary as well as sharing her enthusiasm for music through various educational outlets. She performs and records widely throughout Europe, the Far East and America as a principal player and continuo-cellist with the English Baroque Soloists, Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment as well as chamber ensembles including Brandenburg Consort, The Music Collection, Fiori Musicali, Florilegium, Configure8 and the Revolutionary Drawing Room.

Abigail Brown (Violin) is an highly regarded player across a range of modern and early repertoire, playing with The English Concert, Kings Consort and a number of chamber groups.

Maggie Cole (harpsichord) enjoys and international musical life playing harpsichord, fortepiano and piano. Her recordings inclue Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Scarlatti and Soler sonatas and Boccherini sonata with cellist Steven Isserlis and a CD of Bach sonatas with flautist Philippa Davies.

Richard Earle (Oboe) received his Bachelor of Music degree from The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and then went on to study Performance Practice with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Baroque oboe with Jùrg Schaeftlein in Salzburg. In 1980, after playing for two years with Ars Musica Baroque Orchestra in Michigan, he moved to London where he has been a regular member of The English Baroque Soloists, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. He has appeared with many of the British and European period-instrument groups in concerts and recordings and is a founder member of the London Oboe Band. Since 1996 he has been professor of Baroque and Classical Oboe at the Royal College of Music, London. As well as playing, he is a maker of copies of historical oboes.  

James Ellis (Violin, Viola, Mandolin) is a highly respected and versatile musician who plays with many of the countries early music ensembles. He is also a noteable composer with an interest in bridging the gap between the baroque period and the 21st Century. 

Michael Fields,  lute, archlute, chitarrone/theorbo, baroque guitar, harp & director, was born in Hawaii, with the song of the surf and the rhythm of ukeleles making a lasting impression on him. He began his musical journey playing folk, rock and jazz in California and Australia, until a romantic interest in older music took him to England in 1974 to study classical guitar and lute. His career as a performer, opera director and teacher has since taken him back around the world several times, and has led to many rewarding and interesting collaborations along the way, including directing a performance of Dido & Aeneas in Belgrade in 1996 with Predrag Gosta as the Sorceress and Evelyn Tubb as Dido. Recent highlights have been characteristically diverse, and included being the guitar soloist in Rodrigo’s "Concerto de Aranjuez" with the Camden Chamber Orchestra in London, giving a guitar recital in a Benedictine Monastery in Big Sur, California, playing guitar and harmonica on a CD promoting organic breakfast cereals and playing the lute on Van Morrison’s latest CD! He directs the medieval vocal ensemble, Vox Animae, whose CD and video recording of Ordo Virtutum by Hildegard of Bingen has received international acclaim. Michael is also a popular teacher, teaching courses in many parts of the world, including Finland, Latvia, Poland and Italy, as well as England. His extra-musical interests include painting, carpentry, Tai chi, psychology and philosophy. Since meeting as students, Evelyn and Michael have enjoyed a fruitful partnership exploring music from folk-song to their own compositions, but have specialised in Renaissance, Baroque and early Romantic songs to the lute or guitar. They have achieved an empathy and communication with each other, the music and the audience which has found followers from Japan and Australia to Europe. Critics have praised “the absolute affinity between voice and instrument” achieved by the duo. To date they have recorded five CDs together - three of English Ayres, one of Italian baroque arias by Sigismondo D’India, and a collection of Lieder with 19th century guitar. Their most recent recording is a critically acclaimed CD with their ensemble, Sprezzatura, of music by Daniel Purcell (Henry’s younger brother).

Daire Halpin (soprano) is studying opera at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Ameral Gunson. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where she studied philosophy and music, she also took a BMus and MMus whilst a student of Mary Brennan at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama. She spent a year in Florence at the Conservatorio Statale di Musica Luigi Cherubini. Daire has also received scholarships to study at many prestigious summer schools including Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, Wexford Festival Opera Young Artist Programme, Accademia Rossiniana and AIMS at Ardingly. Daire has sung roles in Opera Ireland’s productions of Jenůfa and Orfeo. She is already in great demand as a soloist and her career has taken her to Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US, besides Ireland and the UK. She has performed at Áras an Uachtaráin, the residence of the president of Ireland, given the world premiere of Jacob de Haan’s Cantico di Sancto Benedicto for WASBE 2007, performed the roles of Belinda for the Yorke Trust’s Dido and Aeneas and Despina for Candlelight Opera’s Così fan Tutte.

Anna Holmes (Cello, Double Bass) plays baroque cello and double bass with a number of period instrument bands, including the Gabrieli Players, the King's Consort and Harry Christophers' period orchestra, the Symphony of Harmony and Invention.

Annette Isserlis (viola) studied at the Royal College of Music, where she now teaches historical performance practice on baroque and classical viola. She holds the same post at the Royal Northern College of Music. In addition to being a founding member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, she is co-principal viola for Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s English Baroque Soloists, and with these and many other ensembles has travelled, recorded and broadcast extensively. She participates in many chamber-music concerts, regularly attends I M S Prussia Cove Open Chamber-music, and her other professional activities include master-classes at various institutions, being invited to panels such as RPS for adjudicating and musicological discussion, music-arranging and record-producing.

Elizabeth Kenny (lute) has a solo repertoire ranging from the renaissance to the eighteenth century. She is a principal player in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and regularly appears with other leading period instrument groups. She has been a regular part of William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants since 1993, and has made dozens of recordings for CD, radio and television as well as touring throughout Europe, the USA and Japan.

She plays renaissance music with the viol consorts Concordia (UK) and L’Ensemble Orlando Gibbons (France). Her special interest in the literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has led her to create themed programmes with recital partners including Mark Padmore, Robin Blaze, and James Bowman.

Recommended without reservation … one of the most outstanding recitals of its kind on disc. BBC Music Magazine (‘English Lute Songs’, with Robin Blaze)

She studied guitar with Michael Lewin and lute with Nigel North. Robert Spencer and Pat O’Brien gave her advice and inspiration. She spent two years teaching at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, and is now professor of lute at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 2003 she introduced the Spencer collection of music, books and instruments to the public by devising a series of lectures and concerts culminating in a fully staged Elizabethan entertainment, which she directed for the City of London Festival. In 2004-5 she produced a tour of newly-edited works by Charpentier which were written for the Grand Dauphin, heir to Louis XIV, for an unusual ensemble of voices, recorders and continuo.

Most recently Elizabeth Kenny has been awarded one of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Fellowships in the creative and performing arts. The fellowship at Southampton University will enable her to pursue a three year project reassessing the history of seventeenth century English song through performances and published papers.

Antony Pay (clarinet) – Antony Pay was born in London, and gained his early experience playing the clarinet in the National Youth Orchestra, with which he also played concertos in Germany, Russia and Scandinavia at the age of 16.

He studied at the Royal Academy of Music and then read Mathematics at Cambridge University, graduating in 1966. He was Principal Clarinet of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1968 to 1978, of the London Sinfonietta (of which he was a founder member) from 1968 to 1983 and of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields from 1976 to 1986. He has also been a member of several chamber ensembles, including the Nash Ensemble, the London Ensemble, the Tuckwell Wind Quintet, the Academy of St.Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble, and Hausmusik. With the London Sinfonietta he collaborated with many of today's leading composers, including Boulez, Stockhausen, Birtwistle, Henze, Maxwell Davies, Goehr and Berio. He has recorded Berio's Concertino, with the composer conducting, for RCA, and gave the first performance of Henze's mini-concerto Miracle of the Rose, which was written for him to direct from the clarinet. He was also Professor of Clarinet at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 1982 to 1990 and taught at the Royal Academy of Music, where he continues to give occasional Masterclasses.

He regularly teaches courses abroad, including classes in Sermoneta, Portogruaro and Firenze Italy, and has also given Masterclasses in Tokyo, France, Denmark, Finland and Sweden.

Recently he has concentrated on solo playing and conducting, recording the Spohr and Mozart Concertos for Decca and the Weber and Crusell Concertos for Virgin Classics. He has conducted the Academy of St.Martin-in-the-Fields in Germany, Austria and Holland, and the London Sinfonietta throughout Europe, as well as guest-conducting with orchestras in Scandinavia, Italy and the United States.

Antony Pay also performs on period clarinets, and his recordings of the Mozart, Weber and Crusell Concertos are played on specially reconstructed instruments. He currently plays in Hausmusik and also with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, where he is a frequent soloist. He has written for the Journal Early Music, and contributed a chapter to the Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet. He is working on a book concerned mainly with the use of metaphor in teaching and in learning to play. He now teaches a Summer-course at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena.

Julian Podger (Tenor) Julian Podger's musical career as a singer and conductor started whilst still at school in Kassel, Germany. He then read music for the BA and MusB degrees at Trinity College Cambridge. As a soloist his highpoints include recent recordings of Bach cantatas, and psalm settings by Lili Boulanger, both with John Eliot Gardiner; a tour of Japan as "Lucano" in Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea; and Bach cantatas with Andrew Parrott and the Taverner Consort at the Ansbach Festival. He has worked with Phillipe Herreweghe, Reinhard Goebel (with Musica Antiqua Köln) and Frieder Bernius. He has given several solo recitals in the UK, Germany, Uruguay and Israel. Most recently he performed Mozart's version of Handel's Alexanders Feast with Andrew Manze and The English Concert in Valencia and Madrid, and Ulisse, another lead role in Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria in Melbourne. Julian is a member of one of the world's leading mediaeval ensembles, Gothic Voices, the more recently formed Harp Consort and occasionally The Tallis Scholars. He continues his career as a musical director, running his own ensemble Trinity Baroque, which first started in conjunction with his research into performance practice at Cambridge. He has conducted the ensemble Florilegium, and more recently, the Norsk Barokkorkester at the Trondheim Festival.

Andrew Roberts  (violin) was a founder member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and has played in this and other important orchestras for several years. His interest in period instrument performance has resulted in him being invited to become a member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. In the field of chamber music he took part in many recitals with the Auriol String Quartet throughout the country - at the Wigmore Hall, the Snape Maltings and at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh.

Emily Robinson (cello) studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Jennifer Ward-Clarke and subsequently in the Netherlands with Jaap ter Linden. In 2004, Emily won a place on the Jerwood scheme for Young Players with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. She has recently performed with Concert d’Astree, the Academy of Ancient Music and The King’s Consort. Emily is a founder member of the prize-winning ensmble Opera Quarto with whom she has recorded works by J.M.Leclair.

Judy Tarling (Violin) is a renowned string player, teacher and writer on baroque music.  As well as a busy playing schedule with the Parley of Instruments and other period ensembles, she teaches on a number of Early Music courses, including the at the Early Music Forum and the Cambridge Early Music Festival. She also finds time to research period instrument playing styles, and has written both an expert guide for period string players and an exemplary historical text on the importance of rhetoric in period performance.

Linda Turbett (Oboe, Recorder) is a versatile woodwind player who has considerable experience with a number of period ensembles.  

Henrietta Wayne (violin) plays with many of London’s period instrument ensembles such as Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s English Baroque soloist,s Gabrieli Consort and Players and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. She is particularly involved with OAE’s education programme which can include anything from organising a baroque dance day at the South Bank to extracting DNA from a kiwi fruit!