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Richard Watkins is well-known as a concerto soloist and chamber music player. He was Principal Horn of the Philharmonia Orchestra from 1985 until 1996, and is currently a member of the Nash Ensemble and a founder member of London Winds.

Richard Watkins is at the forefront of promoting contemporary music for the horn. He has given premières of concertos by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Nigel Osborne, Magnus Lindberg, Dominic Muldowney, Nicola LeFanu, and Colin and David Matthews. Other premières have included James MacMillan's Quintet for Horn and Strings, Huw Watkins' Horn Trio at the Wigmore Hall in 2009 and Colin Matthews' Time Stands Still for horn, violin and piano at the 2006 Aldeburgh Festival. Watkins also premièred Britten's In Memoriam Dennis Brain, for four horns and strings, culminating in a tribute at the 2007 Proms on the 50th anniversary of Brain's death, and later recorded for NMC on Unknown Britten.

Richard Watkins is in great demand for teaching and masterclasses in Europe and the USA. He currently holds the Dennis Brain Chair of Horn at the Royal Academy of Music.
 

Irish violinist Darragh Morgan has collaborated with many leading composers including Arvo Part, Michael Nyman, Sir John Tavener, Gavin Bryars, Kevin Volans and Michael Finnissy. He has made concerto appearances with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Ulster Orchestra, RTE Concert Orchestra, KZN Philharmonic South Africa, Koln Kammer Orkest, Istanbul Symphony Orchestra and Cyprus Chamber Orchestra. International festival appearances include Wien Modern, Bang on a Can Marathon New York, Lucerne Festival, BBC Proms Chamber Music, Aldeburgh, Spitalfields and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

He is a member of the Fidelio Trio with whom has appeared at the Wigmore Hall, Shanghai Oriental Arts Centre, Casa da Musica Porto and Symphony Space New York and was previously violinist with The Smith Quartet with whom he made an acclaimed recording of Philip Glass' complete string quartets. Darragh has recorded over 25 CDs for labels including NMC, Naxos, Delphian, Mode, Black Box and Nimbus. He has appeared as guest leader of Ensemble Modern, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, London Sinfonietta, Musik Fabrik and Remix Ensemble, and performed with the Bang on a Can All Stars. Darragh is professor of violin and chamber music at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

Jonathan Leathwood was born in England in 1970 and now teaches in Denver, Colorado, U.S.A. Recently Denver University awarded him their Artist’s Diploma, the first time they have made this award in individual performance, and made him the first recipient of the Ricardo Iznaola Guitar Scholarship.

In 1988, Jonathan was a string finalist in BBC Television’s Young Musician of the Year competition. Since then he has won awards from a number of bodies, including the Park Lane Group, the Countess of Munster Trust, the Myra Hess Trust, the Holst Foundation, the Eric Falk Trust, and the Ian Fleming Trust. He was the first guitarist to record a recital for BBC Radio 3’s Young Artists’ Forum. He has twice performed in the Park Lane Group’s Young Artist Series at the Purcell Room in London. One of these concerts involved an exciting collaboration with the Indian composer Param Vir, whose four-movement work Clear Light, Magic Body was dedicated to him and later published by Novello.

In 2001 he conceived and edited Guitar Forum, a new scholarly journal for the classical guitar published in the United Kingdom by the European Guitar Teachers’ Association (EGTA UK). The previous year, he was the British delegate at EGTA’s international conference in Cambridge, where he gave a lecture on analysis and performance. He owes the academic and scholarly side of his background to King’s College London, from where he graduated in 1991 with First Class Honours and the Purcell Prize for academic achievement. He was later invited back to King’s to teach Music Analysis and Techniques of Musical Composition, before eventually moving to the United States in 1998. His principal teachers in guitar have been Gordon Crosskey, Richard Wright, Paul Galbraith, Ricardo Iznaola and the pianist and conductor George Hadjinikos.