Formed in 2002, Belsize Baroque is one of the leading amateur baroque orchestras. It comprises young professionals, students, and top amateur baroque players from London and elsewhere. The orchestra performs on period instruments in an historically informed style. It collaborates regularly with leading baroque directors to give orchestral performances, and works on baroque and classical repertoire with choral groups.
The orchestra showcases the abilities of talented college students and young professional musicians, providing these players with the opportunity to perform with top directors and an experienced baroque orchestra.
Our next concert
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Director:
Joseph Crouch is the principal cellist of The English Concert, The Sixteen and the Internationale Bachakademie, Stuttgart.
Joe first encountered the sound of gut strings as a boy treble at Westminster Abbey and choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. These collaborative projects — in their repertoire, their scale, their energy and ambition — always seemed more alluring than the choir’s daily services, and Joe made the final shift from voice to Baroque cello as a postgraduate at The Royal Academy of Music, studying with Jennifer Ward Clarke. After graduation, Joe joined the European Union Baroque orchestra and Monica Huggett’s Trio Sonnerie. He was later appointed principal cellist with The Academy of Ancient Music and The Gabrieli Consort, and took up a research fellowship at The University of Southampton.
Today Joe combines his orchestral roles with teaching and coaching at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and The Royal Academy of Music in London. Joe has performed concerto solos with many of the UK’s leading period instrument ensembles and recently recorded Nicola Porpora’s G major Concerto with The English Concert.
Belsize Baroque Orchestra Leader Scholarship:
Belsize Baroque is delighted to announce the award of the Belsize Baroque Leadership Scholarship for 2019/20 to Marguerite Wassermann.
Marguerite writes
I am really excited about working with this high-level early music ensemble. I look forward to the mentorship offered by Belsize Baroque’s exceptional guest directors, to their challenging and varied programmes, and most of all, to being part of this thriving historical performance community.
Marguerite is a postgraduate student at the Historical Performance department of the Royal Academy of Music, where she holds the Scholarship of the Enlightenment and studies with Margaret Faultless. This year, Marguerite has performed at St Martin-in-the Fields, St. John’s Smith Square, the Reform Club, and St. Anne’s, Kew. With her ensemble, Judith Collective, Marguerite has staged cantatas by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, and is creating a festival of early music by women composers for 2020. Before she enrolled at the Academy, Marguerite graduated from New College, Oxford University, with a first class degree in music. At Oxford, she helped found and direct an early music ensemble, The Bate Players, which regularly performed at the Holywell Music Rooms, the Keble Early Music Festival, and which won the Bate Recording Prize. Marguerite currently plays on a Jacob Stainer baroque violin generously loaned to her by the Royal Academy of Music
We would like to thank everyone who applied for the scholarship.
We would also like to extend particular thanks to Alice Poppleton, our Bursary Award winner for 2018/19 for her exceptional support of the orchestra.
We wish Alice Poppleton and Simone Pirri all the best in their futures in baroque music.
