Photo credit: Adrian Powter

Rachel Godsill

Rachel Godsill began singing in Pocklington parish church choir in her home county of East Yorkshire. She read Music whilst a choral scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge, before postgraduate vocal study at the Royal College of Music.

Her career has taken her to concert halls across N Europe, America and China – to Prague for performances of orchestral songs by Janacek and Smetana, to Beijing and Shanghai for performances of Britten’s Peter Grimes and War Requiem, and to Budapest and Erfurt for performances of baroque and contemporary music.

Her concerts this season include Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, (Stapleford Granary; St Mary’s Islington; St Botoph’s, Cambridge), Berlioz Les Nuits d’étés (Cambridge Sinfonietta), and recitals of lieder by Schumann and Liszt, exploring the female voice in poetry of the 19th century, for International Women’s Day.

Since 2022, Rachel’s duo Sopriola has toured Northern Europe without flying. The duo has given concerts in London, Krefeld, Berlin, Cologne and Rheinsberg, with programmes including newly commissioned works for soprano and viola d’amore. In October 2024 they will perform in Germany, Italy and Sicily as guests of the 20th International Viola d’amore Congress.

Rachel has performed with the Choir of the Age of Enlightenment, European Voices, London Voices and The Academy of Ancient Music, working with conductors including Simon Rattle, Richard Hickox, Charles Mackerras and Roger Norrington. She has recorded music for film and can be heard on the soundtracks of Harry Potter, Star Wars. Beauty and the Beast and Mission Impossible!

Rachel teaches the choral scholars of Peterhouse, and Corpus Christi Colleges, and the boy trebles of Jesus College, Cambridge. She directs a choir in her local community in Linton and firmly believes that enrichment through singing should be made available to everyone.

More information about Rachel here.

Rachel Stott

Rachel Stott lives and works in London, UK.  She attended Wells Cathedral School and read music at Churchill College, Cambridge, taking composition classes with Hugh Wood and Robin Holloway. She then pursued postgraduate studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying viola with David Takeno and Michaela Comberti, but also managing to infiltrate classes in composition, ethnomusicology, jazz and early music, thus gaining a broader education than was perhaps intended by the establishment.

Rachel has pursued a career as violist and composer, performing with both contemporary and early music ensembles and writing for a diverse range of instruments, including viols, cornetts and sackbuts, lutes, ocarinas, viola d’amore and baryton, as well as the more conventional instruments of the modern orchestra.  She has composed song cycles, string quartets, (No. 1 for the Fitzwilliam Quartet, No. 2 for the Dante Quartet and No.3 for the Callino Quartet), chamber music works, orchestral works and an opera for children, The Cuckoo Tree, based on the book by Joan Aiken.   Her music has been performed at the London South Bank, Wigmore Hall, St John’s Smith Square, festivals across the UK, and in continental Europe, North America and Japan. A record-breaking work, Odysseus in Ogygia, for an ensemble of six violas d’amore, was presented at the 2012 Viola d’amore Congress in Innsbruck, and in the same year Several World, for massed saxophones, was performed at the World Saxophone Congress in St Andrews, Scotland.

Rachel’s compositions draw on a wide range of sources: historical, artistic, literary, scientific and medical. She has written a music theatre piece about the Jewish East End, a vocal and instrumental work which connects the Queen’s accession with the history of the Great Western Railway, and an instrumental piece describing the procedure of Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangio Pancreatography. In 2003 she held a residency as a composer at Blackpool Victoria Hospital, funded by the Performing Right Society Foundation, which led to Gulliver’s Ear for string trio, inspired by watching an operation on the ear.

Rachel is the viola player of the Revolutionary Drawing Room, the Bach Players  Trio Notturno (flute, viola, guitar) and plays regularly with Ludus Baroque.

More information about Rachel here.