The London Handel Players – ensemble in residence for the Tilford Bach Festival
Praised by the New York Times for their “soulful depth” and their “consummate skill and musicianship”, The London Handel Players have thrilled audiences across the world with their performances and recordings. Established in 2000, the Players appear regularly at leading venues and festivals in the UK, Europe and North America, performing Baroque chamber music and concertos and collaborating with the world’s leading singers. They have been celebrating their 25th anniversary in 2025.
The ensemble has performed across North America, making their New York debut at the Frick Museum in 2012 and returning to perform at Carnegie Hall in 2014. Concerts have also included performances at Wigmore Hall, Internationale Händel-Festspiele Göttingen, Halle International Handel Festival and in France, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Serbia and Croatia. Committed educators at every level and holding professorships in Historical Performance at London’s Conservatoires, The London Handel Players give numerous masterclasses and workshops.
Recent tours have taken them to Madeira, Cyprus and Spain. In the 25-26 season they will return to Wigmore Hall to perform Bach Cantatas, French Baroque repertoire by Rameau, Leclair, Rebel and Corrette and a ‘Mozart in Mannheim’ programme and they will also perform at the Tilford Bach and London Handel Festivals and the Handel Institute. Their two most recent recordings are of Telemann’s Quadri and the first volume of Leclair Violin Concertos, both on the Somm label.
Their highly acclaimed discography also includes four discs of Handel chamber music; his two sets of trio sonatas Op.2 and Op.5, his complete works for solo violin and a disc entitled "Handel at Home", which comprise chamber arrangements of arias. Other recent releases include Bach Sonatas for keyboard and violin and a second disc of Handel aria arrangements, "Total Eclipse", also on the Somm label. Telemann’s Nouveaux Quatuors are due for release in 2026.
The utter closeness of the duetting between [flautist] Brown and violinist Adrian Butterfield in Giulio Cesare’s "Se pietà"; the brightly fluid, rich-toned rhythmic buoyancy in the outer movements of the Corelli-breathed Sonata a 5, the closest Handel got to a violin concerto; and the emotively vocal quality that [Silas] Wollston’s slight whisper of rubato has reinfected into the circling lines of Handel’s own harpsichord arrangement of "Ombra cara". All in all, an end-to-end pleasure.
Charlotte Gardner, Gramophone Magazine, January 2024
Adrian Butterfield
Adrian Butterfield sang as a chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral, read Music at Trinity College, Cambridge and studied at the Royal College of Music and has appeared on numerous stages across the world as a violinist, director and conductor who specialises in performing a wide range of music on period instruments.
He is Musical Director of the Tilford Bach Festival and former Associate Director of the London Handel Festival and regularly directs the London Handel Players as well as working as a guest soloist and director in Europe and North America. He has also led the gut-string quartet, The Revolutionary Drawing Room, for over 25 years.
His Baroque ensemble, The London Handel Players, performs regularly at Wigmore Hall and throughout Europe and North America and made their debut at Carnegie Hall in 2014. They have made a number of recordings of music by Handel and his contemporaries for Somm Records. Adrian’s world premiere complete recordings of Leclair’s first three Books of violin sonatas have been released to great acclaim in 2022. His latest solo recording, of the first volume of Leclair’s Violin Concertos, was released by Somm in the autumn of 2025 and LHP’s recent Telemann disc, of his Quadri of 1730, was released on the same label in March ‘25.
He is Professor of Baroque Violin at the Royal College of Music in London, gives masterclasses in Europe and North America and has taught at Dartington, at the Belgrade Baroque Academy and Pro Corda Baroque. He directed an annual baroque project with the Southbank Sinfonia for 20 years.
He has conducted all the major choral works of Bach and nearly a hundred of his cantatas as well as numerous works by Handel (Messiah, Esther, Alcina, Orlando, Parnasso in Festa, Israel in Egypt, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, La Resurrezione, Chandos Anthems) and their contemporaries. He has directed ensembles such as the London Mozart Players, the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, the European Union Chamber Orchestra and the Croatian Baroque Ensemble.
Plans for the 2025-26 season include directing French Baroque, Mozart in Mannheim and Bach Celebratory Cantatas programmes all at Wigmore Hall, a 25th anniversary concert promoted by the London Handel Festival in November and conducting Bach’s Easter Oratorio and works by Ravel, Fauré and Berlioz next summer.
“Equally fascinating is Butterfield's one-to-a-part version of Handel's Sonata a 5; the shading and textures he brings to his line, and the Corellian lashings which he and the others apply to their parts, are their invention.”
BBC Music Magazine, December 2023
Pegasus
Part of London’s musical life for 20 years, Pegasus is a versatile and exciting London chamber choir known for its outstanding performances and imaginative programming. It has a broad repertoire of sacred and secular music from the Renaissance to today. Notable accolades include winning prizes at the Florilège Vocal de Tours (2013) and Tolosa International Choral Competition (2007), and being a BBC Choir of the Year semi-finalist in 2005. The ensemble has appeared on BBC Radio, Classic FM, and Channel 4.
Pegasus has performed at the Tilford Bach Festival for many years, as well as the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music and the Proms at St Jude’s, and at various venues including the Queen Elizabeth Hall, St. Martin in the Fields and the Almeida Theatre, as well as many churches in London and elsewhere in England. The choir has worked with the Southbank Sinfonia under the direction of John Rutter, and with the London Handel Players under Laurence Cummings and Adrian Butterfield, including Handel’s Israel in Egypt as part of the 2014 London Handel Festival.
Pegasus has performed with renowned ballet dancer Carlos Acosta in four productions at the London Coliseum and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and at The Place for Dance in London. The choir has a strong tradition of presenting concerts in collaboration with charities and music societies.
Pegasus’s members are experienced singers who pursue their passion for choral music alongside careers in areas such as education, international development, law, media, medicine and the arts.