All Bach – The Bach Players

Rachel Brown trained on modern flute at Manchester University and the Royal Northern College of Music with Trevor Wye. Recorder lessons with Ross Winters led to study of the baroque flute with Lisa Beznosiuk and Stephen Preston and an exploration of the many diverse classical and nineteenth-century flutes. As a soloist her recordings include the Quantz and C.P.E. Bach Concertos, Telemann Fantasias, and Quantz and Handel Sonatas. With the London Handel Players she has recorded three discs of Handel’s chamber music. She is principal flute with Kent Opera, the Academy of Ancient Music, the Hanover Band, the Kings Consort, Collegium Musicum 90, Ex Cathedra, and the Brandenburg Consort. She is author of the Cambridge University Press handbook to The Early Flute and has composed cadenzas for the new Bärenreiter edition of the Mozart Flute Concertos. Following great interest in her research, Rachel has published two volumes of her favourite Quantz sonatas, supported by subscribers worldwide. She teaches at the Royal College of Music in London.

Nicolette Moonen grew up in Amsterdam bilingually, in a Dutch-French musical family – an experience that later encouraged her to learn the main European languages. In 1992 she moved to live in London. Her taste in music has been shaped by a love of languages. She is passionate about the connection between language and music, and has a special affinity for French music. In 1996 she founded The Bach Players of which she is the artistic director and leader. She teaches at the Royal Academy of Music in London and has directed the baroque orchestra at Dartington from 1998 to 2013. Nicolette studied with Jaap Schröder and Sigiswald Kuyken, and has played with most British and other European baroque orchestras (Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, English Baroque Soloists, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, among many). She 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.

Jean Paterson started life in West Wales, moving later to Hampshire, and now lives in Oxford. Her love of music began through the provision of free violin lessons at the local school, and through singing and dancing. As a player, she has had a career in the best of the UK’s period instrument orchestras and chamber groups, including many recordings, concerts and tours all over the world. Among others, she has played with English Baroque Soloists, the London Handel Orchestra, Florilegium, Oxford Bach Soloists, Instruments of Time and Truth, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and has for a long time been a principal player in English Touring Opera’s period instrument orchestra, The Old Street Band. As a teacher, she had a long association with the Hampshire County Youth Orchestra as violin coach, and now has an active teaching practice in her home town. Her violin teachers included Emanuel Hurwitz and Manoug Parikian, and on the baroque violin, Micaela (Mica) Comberti. She plays on an Italian instrument formerly owned by Mica, built by Fabrizio Senta in Turin in 1669.

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 was principal continuo player for 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. He is also a council member of the Handel Institute. From 2011 to 2015 he was Director of Music at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He is now an Affiliated Lecturer at the Music Faculty in Cambridge.

Kinga Gáborjáni studied music in her native Budapest before coming to London for postgraduate work at the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied baroque cello with Jennifer Ward Clarke and the viola da gamba with Richard Campbell. Since then she has played with leading orchestras, including the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, the Gabrieli Consort and Players, The English Concert, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the English Baroque Soloists. She also plays chamber music with Triologue and other groups. Among her recordings, she played with the English Baroque Soloists on their recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos for the SDG label.