I was one of many musicians to start their instrument at an early age, but as a competitive young flautist, I was motivated more by trying to win local competitions than by the music itself.

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In my late teens, however, I spent a term studying Mozart’s K.488 Piano Concerto as part of my classroom music lessons, and nobody exposed to the magic and charm of that piece can resist it for long. I played an approximation of the first movement with my school’s orchestra as a high school student, and before long I was devouring Mozart’s music – especially the operas – and collecting CDs with a total lack of foresight for the decline of the medium.

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I went to university to study French, but after a little encouragement from a volunteer at the Freshers’ Fair I signed up for an audition to the university’s orchestral society, and over the years I ended up playing for them and eventually conducting them, tackling big orchestral hits like the fifth symphonies of Beethoven, Sibelius & Shostakovich. My love for everything orchestral was cemented.

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Blessed with the teaching and guidance of Michael Cox, to whom I’m more indebted than I can adequately express, I managed to win a place to study flute at the Royal Academy of Music on the Master’s programme, and improved rapidly whilst there, spurred on by the excellence and support of my incredibly talented colleagues in the flute department. My final recital went surprisingly well and won me the DipRAM performance diploma. I met another great teacher, Ransom Wilson, at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and successfully applied to study with him at the Yale School of Music in the USA as an Artist Diploma student.

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I stayed and freelanced on the East Coast of the US for another five years, playing more performances of the Nutcracker ballet than I care to remember, working with groups such as the Delphi Chamber Orchestra, Uptown Philharmonic Orchestra and Contemporaneous, and with the conductors Peter Oundjian and John Adams.

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Since coming back to the UK, I've had the good fortune of performing with the Brandenburg Sinfonia in London and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, most recently as second flute in a perfomance of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and the Scriabin Piano Concerto. My friendship and collobaration with legendary musicians Elisabeth Parry and John Alley continues to be hugely rewarding and it was a pleasure to join them in recital recently at Benslow Music (video highlights here!)

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Teaching has always played a hugely important part in my career, and from mentoring beginner students in a New York middle school band programme to instructing advanced Yale University undergraduate students, I bring a wide variety of experience, but above all an inextinguishable enthusiasm for the music I play, in the hope that my students will carry the torch throughout their own musical lives.