Performers

Bertie Baigent is a British conductor, composer, and organist. He holds the posts of Senior Organ Scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge and Conductor of Cambridge University Symphony Orchestra. He also directs the Percival Ensemble, a Cambridge-based orchestra that he founded in 2014. Bertie has won a number of composition competitions, including the Stainer and Bell Award for Choral Composition and the NCEM Young Composers Award. His work Joie de Vivre was commissioned for and played at the unveiling of a plaque to mark the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the City of Westminster.  His compositions have been performed by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under Antonio Pappano, the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon, the Bath Philharmonia and Fretwork. In 2015 a recording of his organ work Bright spark, shot from a brighter place was released by the German CD label Jubal.

David Chung performs extensively on a variety of historic and modern keyboard instruments to critical acclaim in cities across Europe, North America and Asia. He has appeared in the Festival d’Ile-de-France, Geelvinck Fortepiano Festival, Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival and Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival, and performed in recital series of the Benton Fletcher Collection, the Cobbe Collection and the Handel House. His recordings range across French harpsichord music and stylus phantasticus works by Bach and his contemporaries. David studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Royal Academy of Music, London, and Churchill College, Cambridge. His scholarly contributions include articles and reviews in such journals as Early Music, Early Keyboard Journal, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Music, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, Music and Letters, and Revue de musicologie. His article entitled ‘The port de voix in Louis Couperin’s Unmeasured Preludes: A Study of Types, Functions and Interpretation’ was published in Performers’ Voices Across Centuries and Cultures (London: Imperial Press, 2011) and his edition of unpublished keyboard arrangements of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s music was recently published by the Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music (www.sscm-wlscm.org). David is currently Professor of music at Hong Kong Baptist University. mus.hkbu.edu.hk/chung.html

Julien Cohen is currently in his fourth year at Jesus College reading Mathematics. Having started the piano at age five, he earned his Final Conservatoire degree with honours (Dîplome d'Etudes Musicales) from the Paris Conservatoire in June 2011 and then his "Perfectionnement" postgraduate degree from the Cergy-Pontoise Conservatoire in June 2012. He won first prize at the Aix-en-Provence National Competition in August 2012. When in France, Julien plays in a piano trio which has given several concerts in Paris over the past few years. He has performed on many occasions in Cambridge, including for the inaugural recital on the new Steinway in Jesus College Chapel and as a soloist with the college orchestra and CUMS Concert Orchestra. Upcoming performances include Schumann's piano concerto with the Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra in October 2016. Julien has attended many international master classes, with teachers including Fabio Bidini, Jacques Rouvier and Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden.  He has been working privately with Pascal Nemirovski since 2012. In September 2016, he will be starting a Master's in Performance at the Royal College of Music.

Patrick Hemmerle is a French pianist, born in 1981. He studied the piano in France, firstly privately with Nadine Wright and then at the Conservatoire in Paris with Bill Eidi. He received advice from Ventislav Yankoff, Joaquín Soriano and Eric Heidsiek. He is a prize winner at several international competitions: the Scriabin Competition in Grosseto, Italy (second prize), Toledo (first and Spanish music prize), Valencia (4th prize, Spanish music Chopin and Beethoven concerto prizes) and CFRPM in Paris. His career has led him to play in many festivals in different countries in Europe, North America and China. Among the most important are La Roque d'Antherron and Bagatelle in France, and the festival of French music in Venice. He has worked on several occasions with the Alliance Francaise, for which he did a tour of Italy. The main focus of his activities as a musician is German music. This has led him to present programmes with the last three Beethoven Sonatas in parallel with the last three Schubert Sonatas, or Bach's Goldberg Variations with Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Patrick is also interested in French music written at the turn of the 20th century, and in 2012 presented a serie of five concert, in which he analysed and played the works of nine French composers working between 1880 and 1920.

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 Studies in Music at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. His research interests include organology, cathedral music, performance practice and manuscript sources, 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 engaged in a long-term project to perform the complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, on harpsichord, virginals, clavichord and organ.  www.francisknights.co.uk

American harpsichordist John McKean encountered his instrument 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, John has received instruction from some of the greatest modern masters of historic keyboards, including Jesper Christensen, Richard Egarr, and Gustav Leonhardt. He has performed 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, Apollo's Fire, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and is a founding member of the Habsburger Camerata. Past concert engagements have brought him to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Philips Collection in Washington D.C., Fondazione Cini in Venice and the Montisi Music Festival in Tuscany, Festwochen Attersee and St Florian in Austria, the Festival van Vlaanderen in Belgium and the Händel Festspiele in Göttingen, Germany. 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. Alongside his performing career, John is currently pursuing doctoral work in musicology under the supervision of John Rink and Martin Ennis at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

“The Classical accordion is a young and wonderful instrument with a wide range of possibilities, many of them are still waiting to be developed or discovered,” says the first ever BBC 'Introducing Classical' artist, accordionist Iosif Purits. Despite his young age he has become one of the best known accordion musicians of his generation and has traveled around the world performing at the most prestigious concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, The Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory, George Weston Recital Hall, and UNESCO. A prize-winner at the International Classica Nova competition in Germany at the age of 8 and in 30 international competitions since, Iosif has been awarded a prestigious ABRSM International Postgraduate Award for his studies at the Royal Academy of Music with Professor Owen Murray. He won the Hattori Foundation Senior Award and the Royal Academy of Muisc Patrons' Award, and is generously supported by the Future of Russia Foundation. His extensive repertoire ranges from Russian to Japanese works and from classical to contemporary music. As well as solo performance, Iosif is an enthusiastic collaborator with different multi-instrumental ensembles, chamber and symphonic orchestras.

Stephen Rose is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was an MPhil and PhD student at Wolfson College, Cambridge, where he regularly gave concerts and accompanied the choir. A specialist on German music between 1500 and 1750, his publications include The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Lepizig Church Music from the Sherard Collection: Eight Works by Sebastian Knüpfer, Johann Schelle, and Johann Kuhnau (A-R Editions, 2014). Stephen has directed two collaborative projects with the British Library: Early Music Online (2011) and A Big Data History of Music (2014-15). In 2015-16 he holds a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to write a book on musical authorship from Schütz to Bach. He is active as an organist and harpsichordist, and directs the Royal Holloway Baroque Ensemble.  pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/stephen-rose%28186a1362-3d43-4007-8a16-8fe40303193d%29.html

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 at TU-Berlin, 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. Dan is often seen on stage by Cambridge early music audiences as a player and 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, and he is a member of Wolfson College, Cambridge.  www.cambridge-baroque-labs.com/

William Warns is Head of Academic Music and Choirmaster & Organist at Felsted School. He is responsible for running all matters relating to the organisation of curriculum music, as well as the management and delivery of the Choral Programme. Outside of school, he keeps a busy schedule as an organist, choral conductor and accompanist, and has recently been appointed Director of Music at All Saints' Church, Springfield. He was educated at Norwich School and went on to read music at the University of Cambridge where he was Organ Scholar at Fitzwilliam College. He greatly enjoyed directing the Chapel Choir during his three years of study as well as getting involved with other musical activities. He has recently become a Fellow of the National College of Music and Arts, London.