Denner Ensemble

 studied recorders with Ross Winters and Ashley Solomon at the Royal College of Music. She also studied baroque violin with Catherine Mackintosh and Rachel Podger and piano with David Ward. After winning an Exhibition in her first year she subsequently became a scholar and also won an award from the Countess of Munster Musical Trust. In her final year she won the Century prize for Early Music and was a member of one of the prize-winning ensembles in the International Early Music competition held in York. Further success was also seen in the BBC Young Artists Forum and this led to many appearances in Festivals throughout the UK and broadcasts on BBC radio 3.

Throughout her career Rebecca has performed with many of the leading period instrument orchestras and ensembles including The English Concert, Kings Consort, Gabrielli Consort and Players, and Florilegium. With many of these groups she has toured throughout Europe and the Far East and appeared as both soloist and orchestral player in many prestigious festivals and venues. She has recorded as a soloist for the American Boy Choir in the USA and has featured on soundtracks for film and BBC television. She can frequently be seen playing with the Feinstein Ensemble in St Martins in the Field, Trafalgar Square.

Rebecca has enjoyed a busy teaching career and now teaches at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Bath Spa and Bristol University. She is an examiner with ABRSM and is often asked to adjudicate competitions and acts as an external specialist examiner for conservatoire exa

Karen Glen (harpsichord) started out as a viola player and pianist reading French and Music at Southampton University and the University of Rouen. Studying in Paris she fell in love with the harpsichord and returned to pursue this, first with Virginia Pleasants, then at the Royal Academy of Music with Virginia Black and John Toll, and afterwards with Maggie Cole.

She works as a freelance continuo player with orchestras and choirs, both baroque and modern, in the UK and Europe and continues to do session work on piano, harpsichord and keyboards. She is also involved in music education; this includes private tuition, workshops with the OAE and lecture recitals for English Heritage.

Nathaniel Harrison began playing the bassoon at the age of 13. He studied in London at the Royal College of Music and subsequently at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. He is a former member of both the Kent County Youth Orchestra and the European Community Youth Orchetra. After a number of years playing full-time in Germany with the Städtisches Orchester Trier and then in the Netherlands with firstly Het Brabants Orkest in ‘s-Hertogenbosch then with Het Gelders Orkest in Arnhem he returned to a freelance career in the UK. Since then his work has been mainly focused on period instrument performance although he continues to work as a modern player. He is principal bassoon with the London Handel Orchestra but has also appeared with the King’s Consort, the Gabrieli Consort,the Sixteen,Ex Cathedra and, more recently, with Barokkanerne,Oslo. He was also involved in Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage project in 2000.His bassoon is a copy by Leslie Ross of an original instrument by Heinrich Scherer of around 1730 in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum,New York. He is a founder member of the Denner Ensemble and lives in London.

 Kate Aldridge of the Denner Ensemble studied at the Royal College of Music with Peter Buckoke. During this time she won places on both the OAE and the LSO String Schemes. Further Postgraduate study in Historical Performance was taken with Chi-chi Nwanoku at the Royal Academy of Music, supported by a Winifred Disney Award, where Kate graduated with distinction.

Kate is now a busy freelancer working in the UK and abroad with many period ensembles including Gabrieli Consort, Retrospect Ensemble, Academy of Ancient Music, Les Siecles, Cafe Zimmerman and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

William Hunt of the Denner Ensemble graduated from Cambridge university in modern languages and law, took post-graduate early music studies at the Guildhall School of Music and subsequently studied the viol with Wieland Kuijken. After being a member of the chamber ensemble London Baroque for several years, in 1985 he became a founder member of the viol consort Fretwork, which is widely acclaimed for its international concert activity and many recordings. He has played viol and violone with many of the leading period instrument ensembles in England and has also held teaching posts at various times with many of the music conservatories, including the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, The Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music and Birmingham Conservatory. He is now increasingly occupied with running Fretwork Editions, a specialist publisher of music for viols.

David Hatcher of the Ensemble Group studied viola da gamba with Charles Medlam and rennaissance wind instruments with Philip Thorby at Trinity College of Music, London. In 1987 he moved to Japan where he was to remain for the next nine years, taking an active part in that country’s flourishing early music scene. There he founded the viol consort “Chelys”, with the three principle viola da gamba players of Japan, going on to perform and record both as a soloist, with Chelys and in association with other leading Japanese ensembles and visiting artists including Evelyn Tubb, Sprezzatura, and the Japanese ensembles “Ensemble Ecclesia” and the “Bach Collegium of Japan.” He has also  appeared on NHK (Japanese national television) in the classic historical docu-soap ‘Taiga Drama’, watched by millions of Japanese, and his recordings with Anthony Rooley’s Consort of Musicke, Evelyn Tubb and Bach Collegium of Japan and I Fagiolini are regularly broadcast on BBC Radio. In fact, his music appearances include performing with Fretwork and the Dunedin Consort in the Edinburgh Festival 2011, consort songs with Dame Emma Kirkby, the recording of Striggio’s 40-part mass with Robert Hollingworth and in Damon Albarn’s new opera for the Manchester International Festival 2011, “Dr Dee”, with a small ensemble of period instrumentalists and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, since recorded for EMI.