Dr Peter Collyer MMus DipRCM ARCM

Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy

Peter gives lectures and classes on historical performance research, coaches chamber music projects, overseas the weekly historical performance ‘Platform Concerts’ and teaches baroque and classical viola. His teaching philosophy reflects the breadth of his performing career, and he believes that the study of historical performance practice is relevant to all musicians, and that it opens up opportunities for greater creativity and expression.

Peter has specialised in baroque and classical viola since 1989 and is currently the violist with Ensemble DeNOTE and Principal Viola with La Serenissima, The London Handel Orchestra and The London Handel Players. He graduated from the Royal College of Music in 1984 with the viola recital prize and after a brief spell as a member of Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra he returned to London to embark on a freelance career. This has covered a huge variety of activities on both modern and historical instruments. He was a member of the English Baroque Soloists for ten years, taking part in John Eliot Gardiner’s award-winning recordings of the complete Beethoven Symphonies and Mozart Operas and has also toured and recorded with groups including  the Academy of Ancient Music, New London Consort and London Classical Players.

For many years he was active on the West End circuit and has played in countless performances of shows such as ‘Les Miserables’, ‘Miss Saigon’, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, ‘South Pacific’ and  ‘The King and I’. He played in the backing band when Robbie Williams first sang ‘Angels’ on television (Parkinson, 1997), on numerous pop albums by bands such as Terrorvision, Muse and Feeder, and has toured with the Spice Girls. He can be seen (very briefly) in the feature film adaptations of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’.  Since 2008 he has appeared as Guest-Principal Viola with the English Concert, the Irish Baroque Orchestra, The Dunedin Consort and the Orquestra Barroca Casa da Música in Portugal, and as a soloist at the Tilford Bach Festival. Recent chamber music projects include the DVD Mozart, “Kegelstatt” Trio, K.498: An Eighteenth-Century Conversation with Ensemble DeNote (released in 2012) and a period-instrument recording of Schubert’s ‘Trout Quintet’ with The Music Collection (for release in late 2014).

Away from the concert platform, Peter has been active as a teacher, lecturer and researcher in higher education since 1995 when he joined the staff at the University of Southampton. He was appointed Head of Early Music Studies there in 1998 and Head of Performance in 2002. He left Southampton in 2007 to complete his MMus in musicology and in 2008 was awarded funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to study towards a PhD at the University of Leeds (awarded in 2012), joining a major research project looking at the historical performance practice implications of nineteenth and early twentieth century string chamber music editions.

String instrument pedagogy and editing remain his principal research interests. He has presented research papers at the University of Leeds, University of Cardiff and the Royal Northern College of Music, chaired a conference session at the Institute for Musical Research and had his research published in the journal Early Music Performer. In addition to his classes at the Guildhall School he is External Examiner for Undergraduate Performance at the University of Bristol and gives lectures on historical performance practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, the Royal Academy of Music and elsewhere. He was awarded a senior fellowship by the Higher Education Academy in 2013.