Summer Schools tutors

Laurence Cummings is one of Britain’s most exciting and versatile exponents of historical performance both as conductor and harpsichord player. He is currently Music Director of the Academy of Ancient Music, Musical Director of the London Handel Festival since 1999 and Artistic Director of the Internationale Händel-Festpiele Göttingen since 2012, as well as acting as Music Director for Orquestra Barroca Casa da Musica Porto. He is the William Crotch Professor of Historical Performance at the Royal Academy of Music and remains a trustee of the Handel House Museum.

Croatian-born violinist Bojan Čičić specialises in repertoire ranging from the late 16th century to the Romantic violin concertos of Mendelssohn and Beethoven. He has recently appeared as a soloist with the Kioi Hall Chamber Orchestra Tokyo in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and with Instruments of Time and Truth in violin concertos by Mendelssohn and Beethoven. HIn 2016 Bojan was appointed Professor of Baroque Violin at the Royal College of Music, and is passionate about training the next generation of instrumentalists in historically-informed playing styles. Visit Bojan Čičić’s website.

Over the last twenty years Joseph Crouch has secured a reputation as one of the most respected and sought-after Baroque instrumentalists in Europe. As a player in the UK he has performed and recorded concerto solos with most of the leading period instrument orchestras and is currently principal cellist with the The English Concert and joint principal with The Academy of Ancient Music. Joe is also busy as a teacher (not least at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama), as a course leader and director, and as a coach to modern orchestras in baroque techniques and performance. In this last capacity he has coached the cellists of both The Royal Opera House and English National Opera as well as The BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Joseph was a boy treble in the choir of Westminster Abbey and later a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. It was in these rarefied choir stalls, during performances and recordings of Handel, Purcell and Bach, that he first heard gut-strung instruments. He was immediately drawn to their sound, to the energy of the repertoire, and to the highly animated continuo group in particular. Most of all, though, he loved the collaborations between choirs and orchestras. That love, combined with the manifest unloveliness of his singing, brought him to postgraduate Baroque cello studies at The Royal Academy of Music under Jennifer Ward Clarke (and head of department Laurence Cummings!). From there, Joe joined the European Union Baroque Orchestra, and it was here (in the class of 2000 alongside Bojan Čičić!) that he really found his future path.

Leo is the Principal Oboist of the Academy of Ancient Music and appears regularly as guest-principal with, among others, the English Baroque Soloists, the Sixteen, the Dunedin Consort, Arcangelo, La Nuova Musica and the English Concert, and is also a member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. He performs regularly at the BBC Proms and the Glyndebourne Festival and has toured worldwide. As a chamber musician and concerto soloist, he has performed at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Royal Festival Hall and live on BBC Radio 3.
Visit his website for more information.

Mary Collins is an Early Dance specialist whose research and teaching approach has inspired musicians to look afresh at the dance music that is at the heart of the baroque repertoire bringing, in turn, a fresh perspective on the great composers of the baroque era. A practitioner and researcher, she has worked with music, dance, theatre and TV companies as adviser, choreographer, dancer and actress, touring regularly to give masterclasses, concerts, lecture-recitals and workshops. Mary teaches at the Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music in London and receives frequent invitations to conservatoires throughout Europe. A faculty member of Aestas Musica in Croatia, the Austria Barokakademie and, for 26 years, the Ringve International Summer Course in Norway, she is in constant collaboration with many of the world’s leading exponents of early music. Visit Mary Collins’ website.

Passionate about consort singing, Clare’s expressive singing and personal warmth have won her a legion of fans. Her musical gods are Bach and Byrd, but she enjoys plenty more; many new songs have also been written for her, including a number by her late father Stephen. She has made recordings with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Andrew Parrott, the Dunedin Consort, Fretwork, the Rose Consort of Viols, Alamire and Ensemble Plus Ultra, among others; a number of her disks have won Gramophone awards and nominations. She is also a member of I Fagiolini, with whom she enjoys a broad spectrum of musical experiences, from staged Monteverdi madrigals to banana gags; she also enjoys a regular collaboration with Jacob Heringman. Clare lives in Belgium with her husband and two small sons, and is more often to be heard singing Flemish nursery rhymes than anything else at present – she appreciates the musical variety that different phases of life can bring. For more information, visit Clare Wilkinson’s website.

Carys studied at the Purcell School and  Royal Academy of music, and in 1999 was awarded an ARAM from the Academy for her service to Music. Having graduated, her early career was spent specialising in early music and ensemble singing. She recorded and performed with nearly all the major professional ensembles and choirs in Britain at the time, including The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, I Fagiolini, The Cardinal’s Musicke, The Clerk’s Group, Tenebrae, and The Gabrieli Consort.
 
Since then Carys has changed the focus of her career to coaching and teaching. She is now based in Oxford and teaches choral scholars at Magdalen, Merton and Queen’s and Christchurch Colleges, as well as offering lessons and classes across the university. She is the vocal consultant for The Oxford Bach Choir, and works with the  Merton Girls Choir for whom she leads the probationers program.  She has  held coaching residencies at the university of Perth Australia, the University of Vermont, and Dartington summer schools. She teaches for the Rodolfus Foundation Choral Courses and for the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain. Ensemble singing has always been her primary musical passion, and she now works with The Martlet Ensemble, a professional small vocal ensemble whose remit is to work with students at University College Oxford, offering coaching to singers whilst performing with them.
 

Giles Underwood has a varied career as a bass-baritone, voice teacher, vocal coach and conductor. He is a Professor of Singing at the Royal Academy of Music, having taught at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (GSMD) before that. He studied Biology at Oxford, and went on to postgraduate and opera studies at GSMD under Professor Susan McCulloch. He runs a successful teaching practice in Oxford and taught in Cambridge from 2004 to 2013. Since 2013, he has been Director of Music at University College, Oxford. Giles has sung with many of the UK’s leading vocal ensembles, most notably I Fagiolini, Contrapunctus, Magnificat and Gallicantus. He has also been a soloist for the Academy of Ancient Music and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and has performed a variety of operatic roles. This is his second year as tutor at the Cambridge Early Music Summer School.

Alison is a founder member of Chelys consort of viols where she enjoys researching, performing and recording programmes covering all aspects of consort music. She also has a particular interest in ‘Renaissance’ viols (early viols made with no soundpost) with The Linarol Consort, who play on copies of the earliest surviving viol made by Francesco Linarol. Alison has a great love of working with singers, and the affinity between the sound of the viol and the voice. One of her favourite places to be is as the gamba player with Musica Secreta, an all-female polyphonic ensemble specialising in the research and performance of music by and for early modern women. Venturing into the 18th Century with a beautiful 7-string viol named Flo, Alison plays with lutenist Lynda Sayce in Apollo’s Revels, and the Christian Baroque ensemble Dei Gratia, where she also plays baroque violin. Alison also loves making the music she enjoys accessible to as many people as possible – the best audience reactions are from people hearing something for the first time with no idea that they were going to enjoy it so much! That is a particular focus of new group, Sounds Historical, ​who aim to play in local churches to local audiences with fun and accessible programmes. Alison read music at Oxford University before being given a scholarship to study viol at Trinity College of Music, where she was awarded the college’s Silver Medal for Early Music Studies.

Alison Crum is one of the best-known British exponents of the viol. As teacher, performer, and moving spirit behind several well-known early music groups, she has travelled all over the world giving recitals and lectures and teaching on summer schools and workshops. After considering a career in meteorology, she decided to read music at Reading university as a French horn player. While there she started playing the viol, and later went on to study it with Wieland Kuijken in Brussels and Jordi Savall in Basle. She has made well over one hundred recordings with some of Britain’s finest ensembles, including the Consort of Musicke, the Dowland Consort and Musica Antiqua of London. With the Rose Consort of Viols, Alison has made numerous CDs of English and continental consort music, and, as a soloist, she features on discs of Marais, Bach, and virtuoso Italian divisions. Alison is President of the Viola da Gamba Society of Great Britain, and was Professor of Viol at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London where she trained many of today’s younger professionals over a period of more than 30 years. She is a visiting teacher at several colleges and universities in both Europe and the USA, and continues to direct many courses for amateur viol players.