Amanda Babington is a musette player, baroque violinist and recorder player, specialising in historically informed performance.
Artistic Director of Baroque In The North, Amanda has played and recorded with many of the leading British and European period-instrument ensembles, as well as with chamber ensembles AB24, Four’s Company, and Aberdeen Early Music Collective.
Amanda’s debut solo album, Music for French Kings (Deux-Elles, 2022), was well received: she was described in the BBC Music Magazine (December 2022) as ‘an accomplished virtuoso who is exploring [the musette’s] extensive repertoire’ and was recently interviewed about her research on the musette for BBC Radio 3’s Early Music Show.
She also appears on several recordings with Les Talens Lyrique and Ex Cathedra, as well as a recording of newly edited and previously unrecorded music by Giovanni Ruggieri (Aberdeen Early Music Collective, Vox Regis label, 2018) and another of music by Gottfried Finger (Harmonious Society of Tickle Fiddle Gentlemen, Ramée label, 2019).
Amanda is a lecturer at the Royal Northern College of Music, Executive Officer for the Royal Musical Association, Director of the University of Manchester Baroque Orchestra, and a Visiting Performance Fellow at Aberdeen University. She has given masterclasses at various universities and conservatoires in the UK, and at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music in Riga, as well as talks at Göttingen International Handel-Festival, The Foundling Museum, London, and Manchester Camerata. Amanda has published various articles on Handel, and her edition for the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe of Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum and Dettingen Anthem was published by Bärenreiter in 2016. Her book, Handel’s Messiah: the Creative Process will be published later this year. She has also been researching Musette repertoire at the Stuart Court in exile in Rome.