Dr Kate Bennett Wadsworth

Biography

Dr Kate Bennett Wadsworth is a cellist and gambist devoted to historical performance of all periods, with a special research interest in 19th-century performing practice. She has appeared at festivals across Europe and North America with ensembles such as B’Rock, Tafelmusik, Arion, and Les Goûts Réunis Luxembourg, and given lecture-recitals and masterclasses at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, the Boston Conservatory, the Longy School of Music, and the Utrecht Early Music Festival.

Kate studied modern cello with Laurence Lesser at the New England Conservatory and baroque cello with Jaap ter Linden at the Royal Dutch Conservatory in the Hague, after completing a bachelor’s degree in Scandinavian studies at Harvard College. In 2018, she completed a practice-led PhD under Clive Brown at the University of Leeds, looking at the notoriously marked-up editions of the cellist Friedrich Grützmacher as a window onto 19th-century performance practice. Drawing on similarly marked-up editions, as well as treatises, memoirs, early recordings, and other historical sources, she prepared annotated editions of the Brahms Cello Sonatas, in collaboration with Clive Brown and Neal Peres da Costa and published by Bärenreiter. Her recording of the Brahms Sonatas with historical pianist Yi-heng Yang, released on the Deux-Elles label in 2018, has been praised for its “narrative quality” (Gramophone) and its “ardor and depth” (Early Music America).

Kate is delighted to join the Guildhall staff as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow. Her project focuses on the performing practices surrounding the Schumann Cello Concerto and is called "The flexible text: reuniting oral and written traditions in 19th-century music”.