New Faces, New Website, New Season

​With the recent launch of our new website, we are delighted to welcome Libby Percival and Frankie Williams to our Board of Trustees.  

Libby Percival is managing partner for artist and project management company Percius: amongst her current clients are the internationally renowned early music artists I Fagiolini and Robert Hollingworth, Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque, conductor/baritone Eamonn Dougan and director/actor/tenor Thomas Guthrie.  

Libby was until July 2012 Senior Artist and Events Manager at Hazard Chase Ltd. After training as a violinist and soprano, Libby graduated with a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Music before working with The King’s Consort and Robert King from 1999. She joined Hazard Chase as an Artist Manager in 2002 managing a diverse range of artists including long-term collaborations with The Tallis Scholars, Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini, the Escher String Quartet, Endellion String Quartet and pianist Noriko Ogawa: she started the vocal series Choral at Cadogan. Libby is a founding partner in Percius with Nigel Brown OBE and John Willan FRAM.

Frankie Williams is a consultant in education, music and culture. She has been a teacher and adviser, and until 2011 was General Inspector (Music and Culture) for Cambridgeshire. Frankie has a BMus (Hons) from University of Nottingham, studied education at the University of Birmingham and business at Cass Business School. Her Master’s and Doctoral research at the Institute of Education in London centred around partnerships between professional music organisations and schools. 

She was Vice-Chairman of the National Association of Youth Orchestras and has been on several national and European boards. Frankie founded and ran an amateur symphony orchestra and a professional chamber orchestra, and has acted as a consultant for organisations including the BBC Proms, The Sage Gateshead, Orchestras Live (EOB) and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. She has worked on education projects with the Royal Opera House, London Sinfonietta, Glyndebourne, Aldeburgh Young Musicians, and many orchestras.

Their knowledge and skills will prove invaluable in expanding Cambridge Early Music’s educational outreach into schools and reinforcing its position as one of the leading providers of early music education in the UK.   

A small number of projects and workshops are already planned over the coming year.  The first of which will be BaRocks! Messiah, a workshop and performance collaboration with Eboracum Baroque and Cambridgeshire Music in December 2015 for a massed choir of secondary school children and instrumentalists. 

For more information visit: www.cambridgeearlymusic.org/current-projects--workshops   

Our new concert season continues on 23 October 2015, with The Clerks, who bring together works associated with the reign of King Henry V, including some of the finest examples of sacred polyphony of the late Middle Ages, to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.  The programme draws on the rich seam of music contained within the Old Hall Manuscript, as well as motets and mass movements by the great John Dunstable.  Two works thought to be by King Henry himself also feature, alongside the well-known Agincourt Carol.
This concert is part of the 2015 Cambridge Festival of Ideas.  For more information visit: www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/cry-god-harry-music-court-henry-v 

Our prestigious 2016 Festival of the Voice will run between Thursday 12 – Sunday 15 May 2016.  It will showcase many of the world's finest early music artists including: Vox Luminis, Voces8, The Gesualdo Six, Three Medieval Tenors and James Gilchrist, who will perform an eclectic range of music from medieval Conductus, Monteverdi, Lassus, Bach, Schubert and many others in some of Cambridge’s most beautiful and historic venues.

For more information and booking visit: www.cambridgeearlymusic.org/festival-of-the-voice

In other news, Christopher Roberts, our Administrator, has been commissioned by Leeds Baroque Choir and Orchestra to compose a new work for a period instrument orchestra.  The piece will complement a programme of works for state occasions by Handel and will be performed on 15 November 2015 as part of the University of Leeds International Concert Series.  Christopher, a Leeds alumnus, is no stranger to the early music scene, having won the 19 to 25 category for his work written for Fretwork in the 2011 National Centre for Early Music Composers Award.  The commission is supported by a grant from Leeds City Council’s arts funding programme, Leeds Inspired.  

For more information visit: www.leedsbaroque.org/news