Kate Bennett Wadsworth
Cello
Kate Bennett Wadsworth is a cellist and gambist devoted to historical performance of all periods, with a special research interest in 19th-century performance practice. She has appeared at festivals throughout North America and Europe with baroque ensembles such as Arion, Tafelmusik, B’Rock, Apollo’s Fire, Aradia, Masques, and the Theatre of Early Music, and her continuo playing can be heard on the Naxos, ATMA, Artemis/Vanguard, and early-music.com labels. As a soloist, she has appeared with Arion Baroque Orchestra, Les Bostonades, Norwich Baroque, and Les Goûts Réunis Luxembourg, and her recording of the CPE Bach A minor concerto with Les Bostonades was released in 2015.
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. She has recently 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 has also 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 pianist Yi-heng Yang was released on the Deux-Elles label in November 2018.
