About

After a formative collaboration with Benjamin Britten and the English Opera Group as a boy soprano soloist, I trained at the Royal Academy of Music, in Switzerland, and at the Soviet-era Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, pursuing a career as a violinist and travelling across the globe with many of today’s leading groups. I later founded an arts festival high in the hills of the Ardèche region of France and established a successful, long-running music education programme for state primary schools in inner London.

I am currently the director of the historic Montagu Music Collection at Boughton House, Northamptonshire, “the English Versailles”, where I have created annual exhibitions on various themes, including, in 2015, the tercentenary of the death of Louis XIV, an extensive exploration of the French Huguenot work at the house. I also run a modernist music and literature series at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, the crucible of the Bloomsbury Group, where I curate programmes with pianist Melvyn Tan. Speakers here have included Vanessa Redgrave, Harriet Walter, Denise Gough, Simon Callow, Sheila Hancock and Derek Jacobi.

My new book, An Absent Life: The Story of the “Mad” Duchess of Albemarle, will be released by Blackwater Press in May 2026.