Elizabeth Bradley represented Scotland as a finalist in the Shell/LSO scholarship competition while studying at the Royal Northern College of Music. She particularly enjoys performing chamber music and performs with groups such as Configure 8 (of which she is a founder member), The Bach Players, Florilegium, the Barbican Trio, and Lontano. She has performed regularly with many world-class orchestras including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Elizabeth holds the position of Double Bass teacher at Trinity Junior College of Music and recently completed a Master of Music, Ethnomusicology at SOAS, London.
Matthew Brook trained at the Royal College of Music, London. A specialist in Bach, he has sung the Passions and Cantatas from Seoul and Tokyo to the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and St Thomas’s Leipzig with the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Happy on the operatic stage, he has sung at the Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Teatro Madrid, Pisa Opera House, and the Opéra Comique, Paris. His concerts in 2009–10 include tours of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the Collegium Vocale Gent and Philippe Herreweghe, and Haydn’s Seasons with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and John Elliot Gardiner. Among his recordings as soloist are Handel’s Messiah, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and most recently Bach’s Mass in B Minor, all with the Dunedin Consort (Linn Records).
Sally Bruce-Payne was born in London, living first in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, where her father was an organist and choir master. (Later they lived opposite St John’s Downshire Hill.) She began her musical studies as a cellist, switching to singing at the Royal College of Music, London. Sally enjoys a career that has taken her all over the world, working with conductors such as Sir Neville Mariner, Sir David Willcocks, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Phillippe Herreweghe, and Nicholas McGegan. Her recordings as soloist include the Schubert Mass in A flat, the Theresien and Nelson Masses of Haydn, Lili Boulanger’s ‘Du fond de l’abîme’ (all with Gardiner), and Pierre Boulez’s ‘Le Marteau sans maître’ (Cheltenham Festival, Radio 3). This year sees her recording a disc of her favourite Handel arias (with The Brook Street Band, for Avie Records), taking part in Vivaldi’s ‘Catone in Utica’ (in Venice) and in a revival of Jonathan Miller’s production of Bach’s Matthew Passion (National Theatre, London). She now lives with her husband and three young children in Surrey.
James Eastaway has played the oboe since the age of 11, but only seriously considered a career in music after taking up the baroque oboe while studying medicine at Edinburgh University. He has played with most of the British period instrument orchestras, and also groups such as the Orchestre Champs Élysées, Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, in repertoire ranging from Purcell to Wagner. James has worked most regularly with the English Baroque Soloists, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and London Handel Orchestra. As a soloist he has performed, broadcast and recorded concertos and chamber music. He is Professor of Baroque and Classical Oboes at Trinity College, London, and has also taught for the Académies Musicales de Saintes. Alongside his concert schedule he continues to work as a doctor and also as an actor with the performance group Theatre PUR.
Rachel Elliott studied piano at the Purcell School, before going to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to read music. She then spent two years on the post-graduate Early Music course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where her singing teacher was David Pollard. Her career has been divided between solo and ensemble singing. She has worked with English groups such as I Fagiolini, Concordia, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Academy of Ancient Music, and the New London Consort. She has also sung with the French ensembles, Les Arts Florissants and Il Seminario Musicale, and works regularly with the Spanish group Hippocampus. Her recordings include lute songs by Campion with Nigel North, discs of music by Purcell, Charpentier and Rameau with New Chamber Opera, music for voice and viol consort by Gibbons with Concordia, as well as a disc of Vivaldi motets for solo soprano. Most recently she has recorded a recital of music by Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, and Caccini for the Spanish label Arsis.
James Gilchrist was a chorister at New College, Oxford, and choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. He began his working life as a doctor, and while studying and then practising medicine began to sing professionally as a soloist. In 1996 he turned to a full-time career in music, singing with the leading orchestras and groups. His repertoire is wide: from Monteverdi through to contemporary composition. In Bach, he is a frequent Evangelist in the Passions, and was a regular soloist in John Eliot Gardiner’s cantata pilgrimage of 2000. As a recitalist, he has sung regularly with pianists Julius Drake and harpist Alison Nicholls. Recordings include song cycles by Britten and Finzi, and a set of the Schubert cycles with Anna Tilbrook on Orchid Classics, most recently ‘Winterreise’.
Rachel Isserlis was born in London and grew up playing chamber music. She has played in various European ensembles for concerts and recordings worldwide, and is a regular visitor to the International Musicians Seminar in Prussia Cove. She is a member of Divertimenti of London, with whom she has made several recordings on the Hyperion Label. Rachel also specializes in early instruments: she recorded the Locatelli Trio Sonatas with Elizabeth Wallfisch and appeared on the BBC Early Music Show. She has worked with the English Concert, the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Baroque Soloists, and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. A founder member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, she plays repertoire from Purcell to Wagner, and took part in the first performance of Heiner Goebbels’s ‘Songs of wars I have seen’ in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.
Foskien Kooistra began her musical career at the age of 5 playing fiddle and viola da gamba; at the age of 10 she switched to violin. At the Amsterdam Conservatory she studied with her father Ruurd Kooistra and with Mark Lubotsky, then continued her education with Herman Krebbers, Jaap Schröder, and Sigiswald Kuyken. She has played both contemporary music and early music with groups such as Asko Ensemble, Delta Ensemble, Combattimento Consort Amsterdam, Amsterdam Bach Soloists, Musica ad Rhenum, and the Nederlandse Bachvereniging. Outside the Netherlands she plays regularly with the English Baroque Soloists.
Alastair Mitchell has played with all the leading early music ensembles since leaving the Guildhall School of Music, London, in 1976. He has been the principal bassoonist in the English Concert, the London Classical Players, and the English Baroque Soloists. At present he plays with, among others, the Academy of Ancient Music and the Gabrieli Consort, and has recently been diversifying into antiques (as he becomes one himself!), specializing in the sale of books, maps, and prints.
Marion Moonen studied flute at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague with Paul Verhey and Frans Vester, and Baroque flute with Wilbert Hazelzet. She is a member of various ensembles and orchestras, including the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, the Kleine Konzert of the Rheinische Kantorei with Hermann Max, the Van Swieten Society, and Concerto d’Amsterdam. Since the formation of the ensemble Musica ad Rhenum in 1992 she has performed and recorded much of the repertoire for two Baroque flutes with flautist Jed Wentz. She features on recent recordings with Wilbert Hazelzet, the Van Swieten Society, the Attaignant Consort, and other chamber groups.
Nicolette Moonen grew up in Amsterdam and studied violin with Jaap Schröder and Sigiswald Kuyken. Early encounters with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt inspired her to make a career in Early Music. She has played with most of the major baroque orchestras in continental Europe and in the UK, including eleven years with John Eliot Gardiner’s orchestras, and has been invited to lead ensembles such as Collegium Vocale Gent, La Chapelle Royale, Ex Cathedra, the European Union Baroque Orchestra, and English Touring Opera. She teaches at the Royal Academy of Music in London and Dartington International Summer School, and devotes most of the rest of her time to The Bach Players.
Stephen Pedder comes from Stoke-on-Trent. He read music at Selwyn College, Cambridge, before studying violin with Howard Davis and baroque violin with Nicolette Moonen at the Royal Academy of Music, London. After graduating in 2008 he joined the European Union Baroque Orchestra and has since worked with ensembles including the Academy of Ancient Music, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the English Baroque Soloists and, as a member of their apprenticeship scheme, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. His chamber ensemble Les Mélomanes won the audience prize at London’s Fenton House chamber music competition and have performed live on BBC Radio 3.
Anne Schumann studied violin at the music academies in Weimar and Dresden and joined the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig in 1989. Since 1993 she has perfomed as a freelance baroque violinist, mainly in England for, among others, The English Concert and the English Baroque Soloists, where she often shares a desk with Nicolette Moonen. In Leipzig she founded her own ensemble, the Chursachsische Capelle Leipzig, which focuses primarily on performances of forgotten chamber music. Anne was the leader of the European Union Baroque Orchestra for several years. She also enjoys playing the viola and viola d’amore, and searching for new ‘old’ repertoire.
Rachel Stott is a performing musician and composer. She played for a number of years with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, London Classical Players, and other period instrument orchestras, while also exploring new music with Opus 20 String Ensemble, Music Projects of London and the New Music Players, of which she was a founder member. She is the viola player of the Revolutionary Drawing Room, with whom she has performed throughout the UK and continental Europe, and she plays viola d’amore in the Ariosti Duo.
Silas Wollston was a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral. During his teens his flair for composing and arranging music flourished. While at Cambridge University he directed performances of Purcell’s Fairy Queen for the Opera Society, as well as a series of concerts with students playing on historical instruments. He went on to study the harpsichord at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, and the Conservatoire Royale, Brussels. Since then he has played for all the major British early music groups and since 1999 has been principal continuo player for Sir John Eliot Gardiner, performing as a soloist in the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000. Silas is passionate about seventeenth-century music and has written a PhD thesis on the repertoire of Charles II’s violin band. Last year he became Director of Music at Queens’ College, Cambridge.