Our tutors are all experienced professional players and teachers.

Annabel Knight (Course Director) 

Annabel has established a successful performing and teaching career as a freelance recorder player and baroque flautist, which has taken her across the UK, Europe, America and the Middle East. She has performed, recorded and toured for many years with the baroque ensemble Passacaglia, and the recorder quintet Fontanella. She also plays EWI (wind synthesizer) in the band Art of Moog. Solo CD recordings include albums of music by Gordon Jacob (Naxos), GP Telemann and CPE Bach (BCR). She can also be heard performing on a number of film soundtracks including Fantastic Mr Fox, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, Philomena, and del Torros’ Pinocchio. Annabel is a committed and experienced teacher who enjoys working at every level, from complete beginners to emerging young professional players. Annabel is currently head of the recorder department at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and has been running the Woodhouse Recorder Week summer schools since 2004.

Chris Orton

Chris Orton is active as a recorder player, conductor, Dalcroze Eurhythmics practitioner and teacher. He works with the youngest students through to special music schools, conservatoires, and adult amateurs. Chris finds the process of teaching and learning endlessly fascinating, and always enjoys working with different groups of people. He organises the recorder departments at Chethams School of Music, Junior School and Senior College of the RNCM, conducts on NYRO courses and Stockport Youth Orchestra, teaches at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and teaches chamber music and Dalcroze at L´Escola de Música Joan Llongueres in Barcelona.

Rebecca Austen-Brown (Junior Day)

Since studying the recorder at the Royal Academy of Music, Rebecca has become known as a multi-instrumentalist, adding medieval fiddles, baroque violin and viola, renaissance flute, psaltery, and bagpipes to her collection of instruments. As well as being a founding member of Fontanella and her medieval ensemble Bardos Band, she performs and records with The Sixteen, I Fagiolini, The City Musick, and the Dufay Collective, as well as having appeared as a soloist with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Britten Sinfonia, The Feinstein Ensemble, La Nuove Musica,  and The Orchestra of the Swan. As a session musician, she can be heard on such films as The Hobbit, Les Miserables and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Rebecca toured with the Globe Theatre’s production, Eternal Love throughout the UK in 2014. She has given lectures and lessons in recorder playing and teaching, medieval music and fiddle at the Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham University, and Oxford University and is in demand as an adjudicator and syllabus writer.

Louise Bradbury (Junior Day)

Louise enjoys a rich and varied career as a performer and educationalist, for which she has been elected an Associate member of the Royal Academy of Music. With Fontanella and Passacaglia, Louise has enjoyed the privilege of performing in some of the UK and Europe’s leading venues and festivals. She has broadcast on numerous occasions on BBC Radio 3, Classic FM and BBC TV including providing baroque music for Mark Gatiss’s “Martin’s Close” on BBC Four. Louise is supported by the Royal Philharmonic Society Enterprise Fund in association with Harriet’s Trust. Louise’s desire to encourage young recorder players has led to her teaching at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, several universities and the Junior Department of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In addition to performing, Louise is director of Little Notes, providing music workshops for families across the UK and in Amsterdam.

Robin Bigwood (accompaniment)

Robin Bigwood is one of the UK’s busiest harpsichordists, performing regularly as a soloist and as a continuo player with Passacaglia, Feinstein Ensemble, London Baroque, The Sixteen, Florilegium and Britten Sinfonia. Robin was brought up near Bristol in the UK, studied harpsichord and piano at the Royal College of Music and won the Broadwood Harpsichord Competition in 1995. In 2009 he became a regular member of the Feinstein Ensemble, and plays with them in their busy series at St Martin in the Fields, London, and recently at the Purcell Room as part of the South Bank Centre’s Bach Weekend. Outside of performing, Robin is passionate about recording technology. He has produced and engineered many successful CDs, and writes regularly for the respected recording magazine, Sound on Sound. He also runs the independent record label, BCR.