Guest Artists
We are delighted to welcome our 2025 guest artists, who are invited to perform in the Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival by Festival Co-directors, Anthony Marwood and Richard Lester, collaborating in different ensembles across the long weekend of concerts.
2025 Guest Artists
Julian Chan – piano
c. 48 Production
Rapidly developing a reputation as one of the most innovative pianists of his generation, Julian Chan has given performances at numerous prestigious venues across Europe and Asia, including Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, Nanjing Poly Theatre, and Palau de la Música Catalana.
Performing music by a particularly diverse range of composers, he has given alluring recitals featuring works by figures from Sweelinck to Messiaen, from Alkan to Rzewski, unifying these various styles in a captivating manner.
Julian has had masterclasses with numerous pianists of international renown, including Stephen Hough, Imogen Cooper, Jeremy Menuhin, Melvyn Tan, Bobby Chen, and Joanna MacGregor; distinguished conductors with whom he has performed, both as a soloist and as part of the acclaimed Manson Ensemble, include Jessica Cottis, Dominic Grier, Ryan Wigglesworth, Ben Glassberg, Jonathan Berman, and John Gibbons.
Recently, Julian has been awarded First Prize and Sonata Prize at the Nanyang International Music Competition, Singapore, Second Prize at the Jazeps Vitols International Piano Competition, Latvia, First Prize at the Norah Sande Award, and First Prize at the Coulsdon and Purley Festival with his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto.
A passionate composer and performer of new music, Julian has collaborated with eminent composers such as Hans Abrahamsen, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Jörg Widmann, Deborah Pritchard, Elena Langer, and Peter Seabourne.
Julian is currently recipient of the Aud Jebsen Fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with Ian Fountain and Michael Dussek. He had his first book of compositions published at age 6, earning him the title of Malaysia’s Youngest Composer.
Hélène Clément – viola
c. George Garnier
Born in France in 1988, Hélène Clément has learned to combine her proud love for french wine with the cheese delicacies found in England when she moved to London in 2013. Her ferocious enthusiasm and thirst for the chamber music and viola repertoire leads her to constantly expand her musical horizons by performing with a wide range of different collaborations, playing in the most prestigious concert halls in Europe and around the World.
Following her passion as a chamber musician, she has performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Wigmore Hall in London, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Konzerthaus in Berlin, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Cité de la Musique in Paris. Her chamber music partners have included Mitsuko Uchida, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Nicolas Altstaedt, Benjamin Grosvenor, Alexander Melnikov, Jonathan Biss and Peter Wispelwey, as well as the Brentano String Quartet, the Quatuor Ébène, the Quatuor Modigliani and the Nash Ensemble.
She was for twelve years the viola player of the Doric String Quartet, with which she fulfilled her appetite for deep explorations of the repertoire, from Haydn String Quartets to newly commissioned pieces. They have released together a wide range of recordings, including works by Haydn, Britten, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Beethoven and Brett Dean. The Quartet played recitals at the Amsterdam Muziekgebouw, Vienna Musikverein, Frankfurt Alte Oper, Hamburg Laeiszhalle and De Singel, and regular performances at the Wigmore Hall. Further afield they have toured to Japan, Israel, Australia, America, Asia and New Zealand. Ms. Clément is a frequent guest at the prestigious Marlboro Music Festival in America and Prussia Cove in England.
She has released a recording of Britten and Bridge Viola works & songs with Dame Sarah Connolly and Alasdair Beatson, for Chandos Records. This recording was performed on a 1843 Italian viola owned previously by Benjamin Britten and Frank Bridge. The viola is generously lent to her by Britten Pears Arts.
She is a Professor of Viola and Chamber Music at the Royal Academy of Music of London.
Steven Mackey – composer / guitarist
c. Kah Poon
“My entire life was changed by a single note.”
As a teenager growing up in Northern California obsessed with blues-rock guitar, Steven Mackey was in search of the “right wrong notes,” as he often likes to say, referencing Thelonius Monk. The single note in question occurs in the second movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet, which a 19-year-old Mackey heard while driving around northern California: an unexpected unison E-flat that wielded the power to explode assumptions he had about classical music. He would later describe it as the most psychedelic rock music he’d ever heard. Mackey cites this as the moment he decided to become a composer, and it set the young guitarist on a path that has defined his music to this day: Colorful notes (including blue) creating vivid topographies that serve as landmarks on fantastical journeys.
Today, Steven Mackey is a GRAMMY-winning composer of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera—commissioned by the greatest orchestras around the world, and winner of several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. Bright in colouring, ecstatic in inventiveness, lively and profound, Mackey’s music spins the tendrils of his improvisatory riffs into large-scale works of grooving, dramatic coherence.
Mackey began composition studies at the University of California at Davis and received his PhD at Brandeis University. Upon graduating and becoming a professor at Princeton, Mackey came to realise his true creative voice by merging his academic training with the free-spirited physicality of his mother-tongue rock guitar music. Signature pieces incorporating rock vernacular into traditional classical ensembles emerged: Troubadour Songs (1991) for string quartet and electric guitar; Physical Property (1992) for electric guitar and string quartet; and Banana/Dump Truck (1995), a concerto for solo electrified cello plus a ripieno group of cellists and orchestra.
The decades that followed saw Mackey create many of the defining pieces in his repertoire: Dreamhouse (2003) for solo tenor, vocal quartet, electric guitar quartet and orchestra, nominated for four GRAMMY awards; A Beautiful Passing (2008) for violin and orchestra, an emotional reflection upon the death of his mother that Leila Josefowicz premiered with the BBC Philharmonic; and Slide (2011), an experimental music theatre piece that won a GRAMMY Award for a recording featuring Mackey on electric guitar alongside vocalist Rinde Eckert and eighth blackbird. In 2021, the LA Phil, Gustavo Dudamel, and trumpet soloist Thomas Hooten gave the world premiere of Shivaree, a fantasy for trumpet and orchestra. Mackey further expanded his theatrical catalogue with his short chamber opera Moon Tea about the 1969 meeting between the Apollo 11 astronauts and the Royal Family, premiered by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2021, as well as with his 2022 music theater work Memoir, based on the pages of his late mother’s memoirs and 2022 Concerto for Curved Space, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons. Red Wood, a new environmentally concerned work, was premiered as part of The Soraya’s Treelogy Project and Mackey’s RIOT was premiered by mezzo-soprano Alicia Olatuja, Mackey on electric guitar, New Jersey Symphony, Princeton University Glee Club, and conductor Xian Zhang.
Mackey’s music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Today, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, and their son Jasper and daughter Dylan, and teaches at Princeton University, where he mentors young composers as director of the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute. In fall 2022, Mackey also joined the composition faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. He continues to explore an ever-widening world of timbres befitting a complex, 21st-century culture, while always striving to make music that unites the head and heart, that is visceral, that gets us moving. Learn more at www.stevenmackey.com.
John Myerscough – cello
John Myerscough leads a busy international career as the cellist of the Doric String Quartet. Regular visitors to Wigmore Hall, since 2010 the Quartet has recorded exclusively for Chandos Records, with recent releases including the complete Britten quartets, works by Mendelssohn, Schubert and Brett Dean, as well as its continuing series of Haydn string quartets. They have also recently embarked on a project to record the complete Beethoven Quartets. The Quartet performs at major concert halls throughout Europe including Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Konzerthaus and Musikverein Vienna, Konzerthaus Berlin, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and Auditorium du Louvre, Paris. It tours annually to the USA performing in the most important halls and cities, including Carnegie Hall, New York City, Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, Library of Congress, Washington D. C., and has recently undertaken tours to Australia and Japan. The Quartet also has a busy festival schedule and has performed at the Aldeburgh, Delft, Edinburgh, Lofoten, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Risør, Schwarzenberg Schubertiade and West Cork festivals.
Alongside his work with the Doric, John performs widely as a solo cellist and chamber musician. Since 2018 he has been a faculty member at the Yellow Barn festival in Vermont, USA. In chamber music settings he has collaborated with Nicolas Altstaedt, Alasdair Beatson, Jonathan Biss, Pavel Kolesnikov, Vilde Frang, Elizabeth Leonskaja, Anthony Marwood and Lawrence Power, amongst others. He is also active as a baroque cellist and has appeared with groups including Arcangelo, La Nuova Musica and La Serenissima.
Away from the concert stage John is a dedicated teacher and mentor. He is Professor of Cello and Chamber Music at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where the Quartet holds the position of ‘Teaching Quartet in Association’. He is the Artistic Director of the Drimnin String Quartet Academy on the west coast of Scotland and also gives masterclasses for the London-based ChamberStudio and the ProQuartet Professional Training Programme for String Quartets in France.
John performs on a 1587 Brothers Amati cello.
Grace Park – violin
c. Marco Borggreve
Grace Park is a violinist celebrated for her artistry, passion, and virtuosity. Praised by the San Francisco Chronicle as “fresh, different and exhilarating” and by Strings Magazine for her “intensely wrought and burnished” sound, she captivates audiences worldwide. A winner of the Naumburg International Violin Competition, Ms. Park is recognized both as a dynamic soloist and a devoted chamber musician.
Ms. Park’s most recent solo debuts include the Colorado Music Festival, Bard Festival under the baton of Leon Botstein, Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall with the New York Youth Symphony, The Rudolfinum/ Dvorak Hall in Prague with Prague Philharmonia, and recital debuts at Krannert Center, Beethoven Minnesota Festival and Merkin Hall.
Future collaborations include her solo debuts at Seoul Arts Center with Les Musiciens du Louvre with Marc Minkowski, Sarasota Orchestra with Peter Oundjian, Orlando Philharmonic with Eric Jacobsen, along with chamber music debuts at the Savannah Music Festival and Camerata Pacifica.
Ms. Park recorded her debut solo album with the Prague Philharmonia and their music director, Emmanuel Villaume, which will include concertos and solo works of Mozart and Dvorak. It is set to be released in the spring of 2025.
A devoted and passionate educator, Ms. Park is an alumnus of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect and has taught masterclasses and coached at Conservatorio de Musica de Cartagena, Mannes School of Music, University of North Carolina, University of Mississippi, Washington and Lee University, North Dakota State University, Skidmore College, among others. She currently teaches as adjunct professor at the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University.
As a native to Los Angeles, California, Ms. Park began violin at the age of 5 where she trained at the Colburn School of Music. She continued her studies at Colburn Conservatory and New England Conservatory for her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees. Principal teachers are Donald Weilerstein, Miriam Fried, Sylvia Rosenberg, and Robert Lipsett. She now resides in New York City.
She performs on a 1717 Giuseppe Filius Andrea Guarneri on loan from an anonymous sponsor.
Shai Wosner – piano
c. Marco Borggreve
Pianist Shai Wosner has attracted international recognition for his exceptional artistry, musical integrity, and creative insight. His performances of a broad range of repertoire—from Beethoven and Schubert to Ligeti and the music of today—reflect a degree of virtuosity and intellectual curiosity that has made him a favourite among audiences and critics, who note his “keen musical mind and deep musical soul” (NPR’s All Things Considered).
Highlights of Wosner’s 2024-25 season are a tour of the northeastern United States and Canada with clarinetist Martin Fröst and violist Antoine Tamestit, performing works rooted in folklore and dance in new trio arrangements created by Wosner and Fröst. Wosner brings the same musicality, intellect, and sensitivity to his arrangements as he does his piano playing. He has arranged Beethoven’s Symphony Nos. 1, 4 and 6 as trios for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax, and violinist Leonidas Kavakos. The latter two arrangements are featured on the trio’s “Beethoven for Three” recordings from Sony Classical. This season, Wosner also performs a recital program of Schubert and David Lang with baritone Benjamin Appl commemorating the centenary of legendary baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at New York’s Town Hall, presented by the Peoples’ Symphony Concerts (PSC) where Wosner is Artist-in-Residence; a performance with the JACK Quartet on the Music Mondays series in New York, and performances with Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Additionally, he tours Europe with violinist Joshua Bell, and continues to perform as part of the Zukerman Trio with violinist Pinchas Zukerman and cellist Amanda Forsyth.
Wosner has appeared with the major North American orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Berkeley, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Ottawa, San Francisco, and Toronto, among others. He has performed abroad with the BBC orchestras, the Barcelona, Bournemouth, and Gothenburg Symphonies, LSO St. Luke’s, Staatskapelle Berlin, and the Vienna Philharmonic, among others. Wosner performs regularly at chamber music festivals, including Chamber Music Northwest, Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival, Oregon Bach Festival, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.
His acclaimed recordings for Onyx Classics range from Schubert sonatas, to chamber works by Bartók and Kurtág, to concerti by Haydn and Ligeti. Recent albums include a recording of Beethoven’s 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120 also released on Onyx. The Diabelli Variations inspired Wosner to commission and record solo piano works from contemporary composers Derek Bermel, Anthony Cheung, John Harbison, Vijay Iyer, and Wang Lu, which were released on New Focus Recordings alongside Christopher Cerrone’s concerto for piano and strings, The Air Suspended, written for Wosner.
Born in Israel, Wosner enjoyed a broad musical education from a very early age, studying piano with Opher Brayer and Emanuel Krasovsky, as well as composition, theory, and improvisation with André Hajdu. He later studied with Emanuel Ax at The Juilliard School, where Wosner is also now on the piano faculty. He is a recipient of Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award. For more information on Wosner go to www.shaiwosner.com.
Lumas Winds
Beth Stone, flute- Ewan Millar, oboe
- Benjamin Hartnell-Booth, French horn
- Flo Plane, bassoon
- Rennie Sutherland, clarinet
Beth Stone, fluteLumas Winds are committed ambassadors for wind chamber music and the rich variety of repertoire it offers. As winners of numerous prizes, regularly featuring at festivals and music clubs up and down the UK, they have firmly established themselves as a group to watch and have been described as an ‘effervescent wind quintet, lively in their performance style and enterprising in their choice of repertoire’ (Seen and Heard International).
The ensemble released their debut album, The Naming of Birds, in May 2024 for Champs Hill records. The disc highlights their passion as advocates for works that deserve recognition and was described by Andrew McGregor as ‘an excellent and highly enjoyable survey of the British wind quintet from the early 1960s into this century’ (BBC Radio 3, Record Review). Six hidden gems feature from each decade from 1960 to 2010 including three world premiere recordings by Beamish, Higgins, and Maconchy. Prior to recording, the group won the Royal Academy of Music’s Historical Women Composers Prize for a performance of the Elizabeth Maconchy Wind Quintet (1980).
They are currently featured young artists with the Countess of Munster Recital Scheme as well as the Kirckman Concerts Society. The latter of which will see them make their King’s Place debut in May 2025. Prior to this the group were Tunnell Trust Young Artists, taking them on a tour of Scottish music clubs in February 2024; Britten Pears Young Artists, which provided them with a week long residency in Snape Maltings, exploring various contemporary works with the Montreal based Qautuor Bozzini, as well as the performance of a newly commissioned work by composer Marcello Palazzo; and Philip and Dorothy Green Young Artists through Making Music.
The group has featured at the Corbridge, Ironstone, Winchester, and Lake District chamber music festivals – this has included performances of Poulenc’s Sextet alongside Benjamin Frith and Huw Watkins as well as collaborations with other esteemed musicians like Lucy and Kate Gould, Ralph de Souza, and Rosalind Ventris. They made their Wigmore Hall debut in June 2023 with an energised performance of Lalo Schifrin’s La Nouvelle Orleans.
Lumas evolved through friendships formed at the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, with the ensemble being established in 2018. This has resulted in a strong bond between its members, carrying the group forward with confidence in its shared vision. The group presents diverse and varied programmes, framing lesser known works alongside classics of the canon, and their concerts embrace verbal introductions which illuminate the thinking behind their fresh and eclectic approach. Their chemistry on stage was highlighted as winners of the 71st Royal Over-Seas League Mixed Ensemble Prize.
Upcoming engagements include concerts at St Hilda’s Oxford and the Dorset Museum Music Society as well as a busy summer schedule visiting the Budleigh, Gower, and Peasmarsh music festivals.
Website: www.lumaswinds.com
Britten Sinfonia
c. Mark Allan
Britten Sinfonia is a different kind of orchestra. It is defined not by the traditional figurehead of a principal conductor, but by the dynamic and democratic meeting of its outstanding individual players and the broad range of their collaborators – from Steve Reich, Thomas Adès and Alison Balsom to
Pagrav Dance Company, Jacob Collier and Anoushka Shankar.
Rooted in the East of England, where it is the only professional orchestra working throughout the region, Britten Sinfonia also has a national and international reputation as one of today’s finest ensembles. It is renowned for its adventurous programming and stunningly high-quality performances, and equally for its record of commissioning new music, nurturing new composing talent, and inspiring schoolchildren, hospital patients and communities across the East of England.
Britten Sinfonia’s main touring locations are in London, Saffron Walden, Cambridge and Norwich. The orchestra also performs regularly at London’s Wigmore Hall and appears at UK festivals including Aldeburgh, Brighton, Norfolk & Norwich and the BBC Proms. Its prolific discography features many award-winning recordings.
Website: www.brittensinfonia.com