For several years, while I was a student at the Guildhall School in London under Dai Miller (1998-2002), I focussed exclusively as a soloist on the so-called "Renaissance" lute that is to say, a lute in nominal pitch "G" tuning, with between six to ten courses, that was used throughout the Renaissance and into the Baroque era. My first love was for the English repertoire as typified by Thomas Robinson, John Johnson, Ferrabosco the Elder, John Danyel, and above all, the great John Dowland. I also explored, with much help from Nancy Hadden, the relation between the English lute-song and its forbearer, the French air de cour. I spent most of my time as an accompanist in London performing the lute songs of these two national styles. It was also during these years that I began to discover the lute, archlute, and theorbo (or "chitarrone") music of seventeenth-century Italian masters such as Simone Molinaro, Alessandro Piccinini and Girolamo Kapsberger.
Later, my time in Oxford proved extremely useful as a player, since the luxury of pure research granted the time to focus on instruments and styles contemporaneous to my work. I was able to spend, for instance, the entire academic year 2002-2003 working exclusively on the beautiful and esoteric repertoire of the French theorbo. The academic year following, 2003-2004, I shifted tack and could focus entirely on French lute music of the Grand Siècle, and its artistic progeny across the Rhine as best typified by the composers Sylvius Leopold Weiss and Jan Antonin Losy, Count of Losinthal. Furthermore, having fortnightly supervisions throughout this period with Edward Higginbottom, a pre-eminent artist of humbling talent and a stunning French Baroque scholar, proved invaluable.
For the past seven years, I have also had the good fortune to glean my continuo skills with a host of talented artists from all over Europe, covering repertoire that has been equally varied. On all varieties of long-necked lutes, I have accompanied Monteverdi, Handel, Bach, Rossi, Purcell, Corelli, Biber, Dering, and a host of other composers of opera, oratorio, madrigals, masses, and all manner of chamber music be it sacred, secular, pompous or profane. Since my move to Paris in the summer of 2004 I have been able to continue such musical adventures with wonderful French musicians of outstanding calibre.
