The performers

Biographical information correct as for 2011

Martin Ennis is Fellow and Director of Music at Girton College. He began his higher education as Organ Scholar of Christ's College, and on graduating pursued further studies in Germany. His teachers included Gillian Weir, Michael Schneider, Hugo Ruf and Gustav Leonhardt. He joined the permanent staff of the Cambridge Music Faculty in 1994, serving as Faculty Chairman in 2002-5 and again in 2008-11. Martin's research centres on the analysis of music, particularly that of Brahms, but he has also worked extensively on historicism in the music of the nineteenth century, and on German music of the inter-war period. In recognition of his teaching he won one of the University’s Pilkington Prizes in 2009. Martin combines university life with a busy career as a performer. He has been a prize-winner at several international competitions and, in addition to serving as principal keyboard player of the London Mozart Players, has performed with the Monteverdi Choir (for their 25th anniversary concert), the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Polish Chamber Orchestra and Orchestra of St Luke's, New York. He has made BBC recordings with several chamber groups, and made his first concerto recording with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

David R. M. Irving is Director of Music and Director of Studies in Music at Downing College, Cambridge, and a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Music at King’s College, London, where he works on the ERC-funded project ‘Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean’. He studied violin and musicology in Australia and played baroque violin in the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra for four years before moving to Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in musicology in 2007. As a baroque violinist, David has toured and recorded with numerous ensembles including the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, the Gabrieli Consort & Players, the Hanover Band, La Serenissima, the Early Opera Company, St James's Baroque Players, La Compañía Musical and XVIII-21 Le Baroque Nomade. He has also played keyboard from an early age and was a parish organist for several years in Australia.

Francis Knights studied at the universities of London, Oxford and Nottingham. He has held music directorships at several Oxford colleges, and research positions at the Royal Northern College of Music and King’s College, London; since 2008 he has been Director of Music and Director of Studies in Music at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and is now also Editor of  Early Music. His research interests include cathedral music, manuscript sources, performance practice and organology, and his compositions have been performed in St Paul’s, Portsmouth, Lichfield, Oxford and Dublin cathedrals. Francis studied harpsichord with Robert Woolley and David Roblou and organ with Harry Bramma, and is currently undertaking a complete performance of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, on harpsichord, virginals, clavichord and organ, in 25 recitals during 2005-2013.

Jonathan Hellyer Jones was born in Warwickshire and has spent much of his life in Cambridge, where he read music at St John’s College. He was awarded a John Stewart of Rannoch Scholarship in Sacred Music, and in 1972 received the first Brian Runnett Memorial Prize for organ playing. He studied harpsichord with Christopher Hogwood and Christopher Kite, organ with Gillian Weir, and has performed on the organ and harpsichord in the UK and Europe, in the USA, Mexico, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In 1984 he founded The Cambridge Baroque Camerata to perform music of the 17th and 18th centuries on period instruments. With his group, he has presented many concerts in France, Mexico and the UK, appearing on TV and radio. They have recorded several CDs. In a solo capacity, he has recorded music on 18th century harpsichords and fortepianos as well as the organ.  In Norway and Sweden he has directed modern instrument chamber orchestras in programmes of baroque music. In Cambridge he has taught at both universities and is Fellow, Organist, Precentor and Director of College Music at Magdalene College.

Ryan Mark studied violin, oboe and harpsichord at the Purcell School, and read Music at Fitzwilliam College (2005-8). He now works in Cambridge as a research assistant on editions of music from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, including the complete works of Francesco Geminiani, the keyboard music of Carl Fasch and Leopold Koželuch, Mendelssohn’s symphonies, the Brahms sextets, and Stravinsky’s final work, an arrangement of four preludes and fugues by J.S. Bach.

John McKean encountered the harpsichord and the field of historical performance in his early youth. In addition to studies at Oberlin Conservatory and the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany, he has received instruction from some of the greatest modern masters of historic keyboards, including Jacques Ogg, Skip Sempé, Jesper Christensen, Mitzi Meyerson and Gustav Leonhardt. He also holds a degree in German Studies from Oberlin College. He has concertized throughout Europe and North America as both a soloist and as a member of numerous ensembles and baroque orchestras, including the Catacoustic Consort, Camerata Vocale Freiburg and Apollo’s Fire, and is a founding member of the Habsburger Camerata. Recent concert engagements have brought him to the Fondazione Cini in Venice and the Montisi Music Festival in Italy, Festwochen Attersee and St Florian in Austria, the Festival van Vlaanderen in Belgium, the York Early Music Festival in England, and Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, France, where he gave a recital on the famous 1624 Ruckers. John’s musical expertise extends beyond the realm of performance to encompass music typesetting, musicology, and instrument building; he regularly performs on his own reconstruction of a 17th-century Flemish harpsichord.

Anne Page was born and educated in Perth, Australia, moving to Europe to continue advanced studies with Marie-Claire Alain, Peter Hurford and Jacques van Oortmerssen. She made her London debut playing 20th-century repertoire at the Royal Festival Hall. Now based in Cambridge, she directed the Cambridge Summer Recitals for eight years, presenting many world and UK first performances. In the pioneering spirit of her country of origin she likes to explore some of the less well- trodden musical paths and has been one of a handful of musicians at the forefront of the revival of the harmonium, making recordings and establishing a course on the instrument at the Royal Academy of Music. In 2008 she was featured in a Purcell Room recital for solo harmonium and the Swiss organist and composer Lionel Rogg has written a suite of pieces for her. As a member of the British Institute of Organ Studies she took a leading role in the Historic Organ Sound Archive, recording over 10 hours of music on 22 instruments (www.npor.org.uk). In Pembroke College Chapel on December 1st Anne begins a series of the complete Bach organ works, continuing through 2012 in ten Cambridge college chapels and three city churches.

Dan Tidhar was first introduced to the harpsichord at the Jerusalem Early Music Workshop, where he was taught by John Toll and Ketil Haugsand and has later been regularly employed as tutor and accompanist. At university, Dan studied harpsichord with Mitzi Meyerson in Berlin and Ketil Haugsand in Cologne. In parallel to completing his PhD in digital musicology (TU-Berlin, computer science department), he also completed a Masters in harpsichord performance at the UdK-Berlin. Dan performs regularly as a soloist as well continuo player with various ensembles, such as The King’s Consort, Retrospect Ensemble, the Amphion Consort, L'Avventura London, the Berliner Cembalo Ensemble and others. He has recently founded Chesterton Baroque as an ensemble-in-residence at St George's, Chesterton. Dan is often seen on stage by Cambridge early music audiences as a player and/or tuner of historical keyboard instruments. In recent years, he has held various research fellowships and published on harpsichord tuning and temperament, mainly in the context of recording analysis. Dan is regularly involved in research projects at the Centre for Music and Science in Cambridge, and is currently a research fellow at King's College London as part of the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice.

Silas Wollston has pursued a varied career as a researcher, performer and composer. As principal continuo player and assistant conductor for Sir John Eliot Gardiner since 1999 he has become closely associated with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, with whom he has appeared as a soloist on numerous occasions, including the celebrated Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000. From 1996 to 2004 he was the artistic director of the award-winning chamber ensemble The Private Music, which championed unusual seventeenth-century English repertoire: this became the subject of his Open University PhD thesis (2010). As a composer, his works have been performed and recorded by Fretwork. After studying musicology at Cambridge, where he was Organ Scholar at Trinity College, he studied composition with Robin Holloway, receiving the MPhil. He subsequently studied harpsichord and early piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, and the Conservatoire Royale, Brussels. He was appointed Director of Music and Director of Studies in Music at Queens’ College, Cambridge in 2011.