Playing the Cello, 1780–1930

George Kennaway is a cellist, conductor, teacher and musicologist. He studied at the universities of Newcastle and Oxford, the Salzburg Mozarteum and the Guildhall School of Music. He has appeared as a soloist throughout the north of England, on modern, nineteenth-century and baroque cello - recent solo appearances have ranged from eighteenth-century concertos to contemporary Russian repertoire. From 1980 to 2008 he was co-principal cello in the Orchestra of Opera North. He left the orchestra to take up full-time research in the Leeds University School of Music, working on an AHRC project to create a database of nineteenth-century annotated editions of string chamber music. He is a member of the Ferdinand David Quartet which specializes in the application of theories of historical performance to the German nineteenth-century repertoire. As a conductor, he has worked with orchestras in the UK, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Italy and Lithuania, and he is also active as a cello teacher and chamber music coach. He is currently Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield Centre for Performance Research.