I played first trumpet with Oxford Bach Soloists for their performance of Bach’s cantata Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten [BWV 207] at New College, Oxford, on Sunday 23rd January 2022. BWV 207 was the final piece in the concert, which also included Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto [BWV 1046] and the cantata Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht! [BWV 52]. Each cantata featured recognisable

I arrived at the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles (CMBV) around three hours early for the afternoon rehearsal on Sunday 12th December 2021. I had intended to leave my trumpet in the rehearsal room and have a walk around the gardens at the Palace of Versailles. However, when I arrived at the CMBV, I cupped my hands to look through the tinted window in the door and I was spotted by the musical

I will always remember the performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt in York Minster on the 11th March 2020, with the Yorkshire Bach Choir. That performance would be my last for 172 days. So, it was with great delight to be back in York and – thankfully – in front of a live audience in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall at York University. (I had visited York with Spiritato for a recorded

I played first trumpet for the Installation of the President of the Royal College of Surgeons on Thursday 9th December 2021. The Installation took place at the Royal College of Surgeons of England at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. Prior to the ceremony, the oboists and bassoonists played sonatas and concerti by Prowo and Corelli. The procession, led by a mace-bearer, was accompanied by Handel’s

I performed in a carol service which was led by students from Emanuel School. The service took place at St Luke's Church on Thurleigh Road, near Clapham South tube station on Tuesday 7th December 2021. I performed in the brass quintet with Sam Kinrade (trumpet), Katrina Lauder (horn), Rory Cartmell (trombone) and Sasha Koushk-Jalali (tuba). Charles Jenz directed the school choir, organist, and brass

I performed first trumpet in Handel’s Messiah in Exeter Cathedral on Sunday 5th December 2021. The afternoon performance featured the orchestra Devon Baroque and the singers and young choristers of Exeter Cathedral Choir. It was great to perform Handel’s Messiah with so many young people involved, and congratulations must go to them and to their teachers and supporters. I played first trumpet,

I played first trumpet in a performance of Handel's Messiah directed by Graham Walker at St. John's College Chapel in Cambridge on Saturday 4th December 2021. Will Russell, who was playing second trumpet, mentioned that this was our first Messiah together since before the pandemic. I have only played one Messiah since then, in Evian. It was great to perform it again, and to hear the wonderful choruses

Over the years Will Russell (2nd trumpet) and I have been fortunate enough to come into the possession of several rare and unusual nineteenth-century brass instruments. We were delighted when Les Talens Lyriques invited us to join their recording project – Portrait de Pauline Viardot – as we do not often get the opportunity to play these instruments professionally. The programme featured music

On 20th November 2021, I played first trumpet in Bach's Christmas Oratorio [BWV 248] at St. George's Church in Jesmond in Newcastle with the Newcastle Bach Choir. Their performance, conducted by Eric Cross, marked the choir's first concert since the beginning of the pandemic. It was only the second choral society concert I have done since March 2020, but it is good to see that these are gradually returning.

‘Until about the first third of the nineteenth century, audiences considered themselves in charge of the event. They paid attention and listened as they pleased. […] Performers had to win their audience’s attention before they could win them over.’ – Burgess, Geoffrey – 'The Pathetick Musician' – Oxford University Press (2016) – § '9: To Kindle the Heart: Engagement in Performance' The

The Aurora Orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony was socially distanced and performed without an audience at the 2020 BBC Proms, so it was with great pleasure that we were able to revisit this symphony, to perform it (again from memory) to capacity audiences in Nottinghamshire, London, and Suffolk. The first three performances – at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham (Wednesday

A small number of ensembles in the UK have begun to experiment with using natural trumpets [i.e. without finger holes], although it is still relatively uncommon. It was great to take part in a project that offered enough rehearsal time to develop and explore playing without holes in an ensemble setting; playing some of the repertoire that is thought to have inspired Johann Sebastian Bach. The project,

I performed Bach’s B Minor Mass [BWV 232] at St. James’s Piccadilly in London on Saturday 9th October 2021. The performance was directed by Richard Mayo and was led by Lesley Larkum (violin); singers stepped forward from the choir to sing the solo and duet arias. The brass section played, as did the rest of the orchestra (the English Heritage Chamber Orchestra), on modern instruments. I played

Following an extraordinarily long run of consecutive work, in Croatia, London and Oxford, I returned to Oxford to record choral works by Mozart and Haydn under the baton of Paul Brough, with Instruments of Time & Truth and the excellent Choir of Keble College Oxford. Adrian Peacock was the producer. We recorded Mozart’s Missa in C major [K. 258] on Saturday 2nd October

I performed Mozart’s Vesperae solennes de confessore [K. 339] at SJE Arts (St. John the Evangelist Church) on Iffley Rd in Oxford on Friday 1st October 2021. I last performed at SJE Arts in 2015. On this occasion I played with the Oxford-based orchestra, ‘Instruments of Time & Truth’. We played in the 11am concert, which was part of the Divine Office Festival, promoted by Martin Randall

When I was researching music to include in the book I am writing and refining at the moment (about the natural trumpet), I kept finding myself on Uppsala University’s website browsing the the database of digitised manuscript images from the Düben collection. The Düben collection is an extensive collection of musical manuscripts from throughout Europe. It was compiled in Stockholm by members of

I performed as one of the soloists in Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto [BWV 1047] with the Croatian Baroque Ensemble - Hrvatski barokni ansambl - for the second time this year. Last time, in May, I played in a programme entitled ‘Erschallet, Trompeten!’ in the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb and I had to isolate for 10 days upon my return. This time I performed in Varaždin as part

Immediately after performing George Frideric Handel’s Ariodante at the Göttingen Händel Festival, I segued into another Handel (pasticcio) opera project, Il Muzio Scevola, with Il Gusto Barocco in Stuttgart. This opera featured a Prologue which had been specially written for the occasion by Th. W. Leininger in 2021 to a text from 1723 (Hamburg). The first act was by Filippo Amadei, with a second

It was brilliant to return to Göttingen for the International Handel Festival in September 2021. The festival usually takes place in May each year, but it has been displaced by the coronavirus pandemic. The last time the festival took place was in May 2019, when we performed Handel’s Saul [HWV 53] in Hannoversche Münden. Getting to the first rehearsal was challenging; the Lufthansa flight

Now that I have had both vaccinations, and France has moved to the UK’s amber list (and vice versa), travel has become significantly more straightforward. Having had the vaccine I did not have to quarantine upon arrival in France, nor did I have to quarantine when I returned to the UK. There were still passenger locator forms, declarations from high incidence areas, an antigenic test to be undertaken,