ABOUT
ADRIAN BUTTERFIELD
Adrian Butterfield began playing the violin at the age of four, sang as a chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral, read Music at Trinity College, Cambridge and studied at the Royal College of Music. He has appeared on numerous stages across the world as a violinist, director and conductor who specialises in performing a wide range of music on period instruments.
He is Musical Director of the Tilford Bach Festival and former Associate Director of the London Handel Festival and regularly directs the London Handel Players as well as working as a guest soloist and director in Europe and North America. He has also led the gut-string quartet, The Revolutionary Drawing Room, for over 25 years.
His baroque ensemble, The London Handel Players, performs regularly at Wigmore Hall and throughout Europe and North America and made their debut at Carnegie Hall in 2014. They have made a number of recordings of music by Handel and his contemporaries for Somm Records. Adrian’s world premiere complete recordings of Leclair’s first three Books of violin sonatas have been released to great acclaim in 2022. His latest solo recording, of the first volume of Leclair’s Violin Concertos, was released by Somm in the autumn of 2025 and LHP’s recent Telemann disc, of his Quadri of 1730, was released on the same label in March ‘25.
He is Professor of Baroque Violin at the Royal College of Music in London, gives masterclasses in Europe and North America and has taught at Dartington, at the Belgrade Baroque Academy and Pro Corda Baroque. He directed an annual baroque project with the Southbank Sinfonia for 20 years.
He has conducted all the major choral works of Bach and about a hundred of his cantatas as well as numerous works by Handel (Messiah, Esther, Alcina, Orlando, Parnasso in Festa, Israel in Egypt, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, La Resurrezione, Chandos Anthems) and their contemporaries. He has directed ensembles such as the London Mozart Players, the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, the European Union Chamber Orchestra and the Croatian Baroque Ensemble.
Plans for the 2025-26 season include directing French Baroque, Mozart in Mannheim and Bach Celebratory Cantatas programmes all at Wigmore Hall, a 25th anniversary concert for the London Handel Players promoted by the London Handel Festival in November and conducting Bach’s Easter Oratorio and a programme of works by Ravel, Fauré and Berlioz in the summer of 2026.
He is married to the flautist and recorder player, Rachel Brown, and they have one daughter.
“How does a critic begin to describe the most perfectly performed musical experience in many years? By listing, of course, in a roll of honour, those who created it, beginning with the masterly Adrian Butterfield, whose sure direction (from the violin) and complete immersion in the idiom was undoubtedly responsible for the exceptional quality of the performance.”
Barry Creasy,
musicOMH St. Matthew Passion, St. John’s, Smith Square, London, 17th June 2015
"Technically and musically, Butterfield is a marvel"
Julie Anne Sadie,
Gramophone Magazine, Leclair Book 2 Sonatas, Sept 2013