Passamezzo comprises six musicians:
Emily Atkinson: soprano
Richard de Winter: baritone, actor
Robin Jeffrey: lute, cittern, theorbo
Alison Kinder: viols, recorders
Tamsin Lewis: violin, viols, alto
Lynda Sayce: lute, flute, viols
Passamezzo is an established early music ensemble known for their ability to bring historical events to life through their engaging performances and programming. They specialize in English Tudor and Stuart repertoire.
The ensemble delights in all aspects of musical life, from the intimacy of the lute song, to the brash raucousness of the broadside ballad, from the sacred part song, to the profane insanity of bedlamite mad songs. The programmes are carefully researched with music frequently taken from manuscript sources, unearthing pieces that have lain hidden for centuries. It is this range of material and overall spectacle, combined with the informative and accessible manner of their presentation, that makes Passamezzo such an engaging group.
They have played in a great variety of venues from The British Museum and Hampton Court to the streets of Marrakech.
Television credits include: Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family; (BBC1); Lucy Worsley’s Twelve Days of Tudor Christmas; Howard Goodall’s The Truth about Carols (BBC2); Big Brother (Channel 4) and Becoming Elizabeth (Starz).
About the musicians…
Emily Atkinson
Emily studied at the Crane School of Music in New York and the Royal College of Music in London. She has appeared as a soloist in more than 40 Bach cantatas with the Sweelinck Ensemble for Lutheran Vespers Services in the City of London. As a consort singer, she has toured extensively with the Tallis Scholars and participated in their premiere of John Tavener’s Requiem Fragments at the BBC Proms.
Emily is also a busy chamber music recitalist, performing with viol consorts, baroque chamber groups and other early music ensembles in the UK and abroad. She enjoys presenting creative song recitals with other musicians, and she is an experienced and dedicated teacher of primary class music.
Richard de Winter
Richard was a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, and a choral scholar at Durham Cathedral, before studying musical theatre at the Royal Academy of Music. Since graduating, Richard has performed in a variety of guises, including roles in three original musicals at the Edinburgh Fringe, a stint in the award-winning topical sketch show NewsRevue at the Canal Café Theatre and tours of both the UK and the Far East of an adaptation of Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. He has toured Spain with the Parlon Film Company, playing Geoffrey Chaucer and a Tajik patriarch (not in the same show), before being a chorus baritone in Mahogany Opera’s production of Britten’s Church Parables.
Richard also performs ukulele-based stand-up, creates characters for A Door in a Wall, a company that provides live murder mystery events, and is a historical interpreter at Hampton Court and the Tower of London. He also sings with Trouvere Medieval Minstrels
Robin Jeffrey
Robin has played and recorded with many of the well-known names in the early music field, including The Sixteen, The King’s Consort, English Baroque Soloists, The Purcell Quartet and Red Byrd, and with ensembles such as the English Chamber Orchestra, The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and the BBC Concert Orchestra. He has a long track record in opera and stage music, playing for productions at the National Theatre, English National Opera, Shakespeare’s Globe, Opera North and many others.
Besides his work in early music he is active in the performance of Middle Eastern classical and traditional music, playing the oud, laouto and tambour, and he has performed traditional Jewish music internationally with the Burning Bush. He regularly gives recitals accompanying soprano Alessandra Testai, in a repertoire ranging from Renaissance Italy to the Ottoman Empire, taking in various European folk traditions along the way.
Alison Kinder
Alison read music at Oxford and was then given a scholarship by Trinity College of Music where she studied viol with Alison Crum, being awarded the college’s Silver Medal for Early Music Studies. She is a founder member of Chelys consort of viols where she enjoys researching, performing and recording programmes covering all aspects of consort music. She has a particular interest in ‘Renaissance’ viols (early viols made with no soundpost) with The Linarol Consort who play on copies of the earliest surviving viol made by Francesco Linarol.
Venturing into the 18th Century with a beautiful 7-string viol named Flo, Alison plays with lutenist Lynda Sayce in Apollo’s Revels, trio sonata group Saltarello, and the Christian Baroque ensemble Dei Gratia, where she also plays baroque violin. Alison has a great love of working with singers, and the affinity between the sound of the viol and the voice. One of her favourite places to be is as the gamba player with Musica Secreta, where a recent highlight has been the newly discovered complete Lamentations of Jeremiah by Antoine Brumel.
Tamsin Lewis
Tamsin studied violin at the Florence Conservatoire before reading Classics and Italian at Oxford. Now a specialist in historical music, she has written, arranged, directed and played music for a number of theatre productions at venues including Shakespeare’s Globe, the Rose Theatre and Hampton Court, and collaborates with theatre and dance historians and practitioners to reconstruct masques and other entertainments for Historic Royal Palaces and at other heritage sites.
Tamsin is an associate lecturer in Renaissance art and music at the Courtauld Institute, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries. She has written a number of books and articles on early modern music and society.
Recent work in film and television includes playing the valachord in Solo: A Star Wars Story, wassailing with Gareth Malone in Britain’s Christmas Story; and working as a historical and musical consultant on Firebrand, A Discovery of Witches and Draw on Sweet Night.
Tamsin is a member of the Lions part theatre company and appears in their Globe-based festivals as a violin-playing bear.
Lynda Sayce
Originally trained as a flautist, Lynda Sayce read Music at Oxford, where she heard a lute for the first time, and was immediately smitten by the instrument and its repertory. She subsequently studied lute with Jakob Lindberg at the Royal College of Music, and now performs regularly as soloist and continuo player with leading period instrument ensembles worldwide. She is principal lutenist with La Serenissima, The King’s Consort and Ex Cathedra, and appears on more than 100 commercial recordings. She also directs the lute ensemble Chordophony, whose repertory and instrumentarium are based entirely on her research.
Lynda has performed with many leading modern instrument orchestras and opera companies, and was chosen by Sir Simon Rattle to play lute continuo for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s epic staging of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, performed in Europe and the US. Her discography ranges from some of the earliest surviving lute music to the jazz theorbo part in Harvey Brough’s Requiem in Blue and the latest album from folk rock legend Boris Grebenshikov.
She is very happy to revisit her first musical love, and often plays early flutes and recorders in concert. In 2014, after many years as a frustrated listener, she bought a viol, and now ventures on stage as a gamba player with Newe Vialles, The City Musick and Sounds Historical.
Passamezzo have a Website 
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