Mark Simpson, Guy Johnston, Benjamin Baker, Daniel Lebhardt, Goldfirld Ensemble
Biography Mark Simpson, Guy Johnston, Benjamin Baker, Daniel Lebhardt, Goldfirld Ensemble
Guy Johnston
is one of the most exciting British cellists of his generation. His early successes included winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year, the Shell London Symphony Orchestra Gerald MacDonald Award and a Classical Brit. He has performed with many leading international orchestras including the London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Ulster Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, NHK Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony, Britten Sinfonia, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo, Moscow Philharmonic and St Petersburg Symphony.
Recent and forthcoming seasons have included concertos with BBC Philharmonic (Ilan Volkov), BBC Symphony Orchestra (Sakari Oramo), Philharmonia, Aurora Orchestra, Royal Northern Sinfonia and Rheinische Philharmonie. Guy continues to play chamber music and recitals at prestigious venues such as Wigmore Hall, Queen Elisabeth Hall, Louvre Museum and the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and in festivals across Europe and is presenting programmes with Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Melvyn Tan. He was privileged to perform as part of the Wigmore Hall and Radio 3 special series of concerts, livestreamed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A prolific recording artist, Guy’s recent recordings include Howells’ Cello Concerto with Britten Sinfonia (a piece he also gave the premiere of) and a celebration disc of the tricentenary of his David Tecchler cello, collaborating with the acclaimed Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where the cello was made. The 2018/19 season saw the release of his recording Themes and Variations with Tom Poster, comprising works by Beethoven, Grieg, Chopin, MacMillan, Schumann and Martinu.
Guy is a passionate advocate for contemporary composers regular commissioning, performing and recording new works. He gave the premiere of Charlotte Bray’s ‘Falling in the Fire’ at the BBC Proms in 2015 and Emma Ruth Richard’s ‘Until a Reservoir no longer remains’ with Sheku Kanneh-Mason at the Southbank Centre in 2020. He has recently commissioned works by composers such as David Matthews, Mark Simpson and Joseph Phibbs.
In addition to a busy and versatile career as an international soloist, chamber musician and guest principal, Guy is an inspiring leader of young musicians as a patron of several charities which promote music education for school children and young people including Music First and Future Talent. He is a board member of the Pierre Fournier Award for young cellists.
He is Artistic Director of the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival and a founder member of the award-winning Aronowitz Ensemble. He is Associate Professor of Cello at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York and a guest Professor of Cello at the Royal Academy of Music, where he was awarded an Hon. ARAM in 2015.
Goldfield Ensemble
Founded in 2011, The Goldfield Ensemble are now the resident musicians of Goldfield Productions, a charitable incorporated organization.
Highly collaborative and relentlessly curious, Goldfield Productions was created to make adventures in sound; to find ways of presenting music and art that transform the everyday into the extraordinary and reawaken our ears.
The production company grew from the success of the Ensemble and their growing belief that music can and should be experienced in many different ways to enrich lives. In 2018, Goldfield created and toured their critically acclaimed Hansel & Gretel (a nightmare in 8 scenes) commissioning new poetry from Simon Armitage, chamber music from Matthew Kaner and art / puppetry from Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Hansel & Gretel premiered at Cheltenham Music Festival and touring to 9 UK venues with a London premiere at Milton Court Concert Hall (Barbican) and subsequent BBC Radio 3 broadcast.
Richard Baker
is a leading figure on the British contemporary music scene as one of the foremost composer-conductors of his generation. He studied composition in the Netherlands with Louis Andriessen and in London with John Woolrich, and first drew significant attention with two early works – a trio, Los Rábanos (1998), performed and broadcast widely by the Composers Ensemble, and the remarkable Learning to Fly (1999), a basset clarinet concerto premiered by the London Sinfonietta and Timothy Lines.
The position of New Music Fellow at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (2001–3) inaugurated an important strand of work as a concert curator and programme adviser as well as supporting Richard's progress as a composer. Subsequent years yielded chamber music, a brace of short choral pieces and a number of songs and song cycles – notably Slow passage, low prospect (2004), commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival for Christopher Purves and Andrew West, and Written on a train (2006) for Christianne Stotijn and a small ensemble led by Christian Tetzlaff.
Matthew Kaner
(born 1986) is a composer based in London whose works are performed and broadcast widely in the UK and abroad. His music has been described as “glittering… sparking electricity…” (Guardian 2022), “forlornly exquisite” (New Statesman 2016), and has received praise for its “orchestral imagination and poetic word-setting” (Bachtrack 2022), its “long and sinuous lines” (Telegraph 2013) and “darker and wilder energy, which seems to be entirely personal.” (HK Interlude 2016)
Matthew’s 2022 BBC Proms commission, Pearl, for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Chorus and baritone Roderick Williams, setting medieval poetry in modern translation by Simon Armitage, was described as “spine-tingling” (Guardian 4*) and “a fascinating response to this transcendental text.” (Bachtrack 4*) His debut solo album, comprising chamber works performed by Guy Johnston, Mark Simpson, Benjamin Baker, Daniel Lebhardt and the Goldfield Ensemble is released by Delphian Records in November 2022.
His 2018 collaboration with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, a reworking of the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel for ensemble and narrator, was acclaimed as “an all too timely reminder of some children’s living, waking, starving nightmare” (Guardian 4*). In 2016, Matthew was the BBC Radio 3 Embedded Composer (in association with Sound and Music) for the duration of the station’s 70th anniversary celebrations, during which he wrote 14 works for repeated broadcasts, for performers including Guy Johnston, Mark Simpson, the BBC Singers, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Trio Isimsiz and many others.
Additional highlights include commissions from the London Symphony Orchestra, Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia, Benjamin Baker and the Northern Chords Festival Orchestra, Siglo de Oro and King’s College London Chapel Choir. His music has been performed at various venues in the UK and abroad, including the Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican, Seiji Ozawa Hall, St. John’s Smith Square, the Purcell Room, LSO St. Luke’s and Snape Maltings. His work has featured in the BBC Proms, and Aldeburgh, Spitalfields, Norfolk & Norwich, Cheltenham, Lucerne, and Victoria International Music Festivals.
Matthew has been a Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama since 2013. In 2015, he was the recipient of a Roche Young Composers’ commission for the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra. He was a winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize in 2013; he was the Margaret Lee Crofts Fellow in Composition at Tanglewood in 2012. He read music as an undergraduate at King’s College London before going onto study composition with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School. He completed his doctorate in composition at the Guildhall in 2022, supervised by Richard Baker, and has been mentored by composers including Oliver Knussen, Wolfgang Rihm, Unsuk Chin, Colin Matthews and John Harbison.
