New Year's honour for Leeds professor
Emeritus Professor Peter Holman has been awarded an MBE for services to early music in the New Year’s honours list.
Professor Holman was formerly Professor of Historical Musicology at the University. He delivered the FUAM Annual Lecture 2014 (3rd March) on the different ways in which Handel’s Messiah has been performed from 1742 to now. He is now Director of the early music group Parley of Instruments, the choir Psalmody, the vocal ensemble Seicento, and Opera Restor’d. He is also the founder and director of the much-acclaimed English Orpheus series on Hyperion Records.
He is a leading figure in the musical life of the Essex-Suffolk borders, directing the Essex Baroque Orchestra and the Suffolk Villages Festival. He was joint Artistic Director of the 1995 Boston Early Music Festival, and Consultant in Period Performance at the Royal Northern College of Music from 2002 to 2005.
Peter has taught at many conservatories, universities, and summer schools in Britain, Europe and the USA, is a regular broadcaster, and is much in demand as a lecturer at learned conferences. He is chair of the editorial board of Early Music Performer, and a member of the editorial boards of Early Music, Musica Britannica and the Purcell Society.
His special interests are the early history of the violin family, instrumental ensemble music of the Renaissance and Baroque, and English music, from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. He is the author of a prize-winning book on the violin at the English court, and a much praised study of Purcell's music.
Picture credit: Gerald Place