As Tobias Hume wrote in 1605: Now to use a modest shortness, and a brief expression of my self to all noble spirits, I was named Femme de Merite, Montreal, 2011 and Personality of the year, Prix Opus 2002!

Cellist, gambist, continuo player par excellence, I’m alternatively praised or admonished for my colourful and controversial performances of solo and chamber repertoire of the baroque!

A rebel to the core, from an artistic milieu in London, in my teens I played first performances of Ligetti and Stockhausen as well as performance-art productions in alternative venues. By contrast I studied at Juilliard in New York at the height of the Vietnam resistance and at the Paris Conservatoire at the end of the student riots of ‘68.

San Francisco followed, where, having had an epiphany on receiving a bass viol, I threw myself headlong into new-wave, HIP baroque music-making, teaching myself the viol by playing, reading treatises and creating new styles of performance inspired by old!

In 1676, Thomas Mace expressed my sentiments: I have been more Sensibly, Fervently, and Zealously Captivated, and drawn into Divine Raptures, and Contemplations, by Those Unexpressible Rhetorical, Uncontroulable Perswasions, and Instructions of Musicks Divine Language

As well as co-founding Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra with my partner and inspiration, baroque oboist and writer, the late Bruce Haynes, we spent decades parenting delightful kids and musicing in Montreal where I created the Montreal Baroque Festival, a vehicle to unite the multitalented, Montreal early music community.

Centre of my domaine and a constant pleasure has been my kitchen where colourful, flavourful, creative dishes have echoed my musical taste to surprise, move and inspire!

A perfect description of my vision of music making, Sloane wrote c.1794: There must be an Order and just Proportion, Intricacy with Simplicity in the Component parts, Variety in the Mass, and Light and Shadow in the whole, so as to produce the varied sensations of gaiety and melancholy, of wildness and even surprise and wonder…

I have spent decades with a foot on either side of the Atlantic recording, performing, teaching in Montreal and Copenhagen and touring around Europe, the Far East and Oceania often with my musical partner-in-crime, Margaret Little in the viol duo, Les Voix humaines.

Amongst dozens of recordings, the complete Concerts a deux violes esgales by Sieur de Ste Colombe is a highlight and our arrangements of music stolen from the wider baroque repertoire amuse us and our audiences!

Either praised or criticized for my use of rubato, general freedom of expression, variety of bow strokes and undying preference for harmony over melody, I’m constantly searching for rhetorical meaning and eloquence to bring the printed page to life!

As Thomas Mace says in 1676: …when we come to be Masters… we can command all manner of Time, at our own Pleasures; we Then take Liberty for Humour and good Adornment-sake, to Break Time; sometimes Faster, sometimes Slower, as we perceive, the Nature of the Thing Requires, which…adds much Grace and Luster to the Performance