Born: Somerset

Studied: At the Junior Department and then as an undergraduate at the Royal College of Music, then at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Career before the Royal Ballet Sinfonia: Freelancing all over the place and being a busy instrumental teacher and occasional chamber musician.

Joined: 2022

Why the bassoon? I feel like it’s the instrument that most matches my personality. It’s the orchestral underdog and often misunderstood, sometimes overlooked and thought of as a comedic one-trick pony. As a bassoonist, I feel as if I’m constantly fighting the instrument’s natural tendency to sound slightly agricultural (a very apt description, coined by a colleague). But once tamed it can be incredibly expressive and really sing, and I love the small moments it gets in the limelight before slinking off, chameleon-like, back into the orchestral texture.

Favourite piece of music: Beim Schlafengehen (When Falling Asleep) from Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss. No note is wasted. Soul-restoratively beautiful.

First ballet or concert you saw: When I was at primary school I was taken to what was then the Colston Hall in Bristol to hear an orchestra play and I remember it so vividly as being one of the most exciting and gripping things I had ever witnessed. I never wanted it to end. It’s amazing what a bit of the William Tell Overture can do to an impressionable seven year old!

Favourite ballet to play: Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. I played it with BRB back in 2018 and there was this moment in the ‘Morning Dance’ in Act I where everyone is really going for it and I remember looking round and thinking 'THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER!'.

Most challenging piece of music to play: Probably John Adams’s Chamber Symphony. I’ve played it three or four times and each time I tell myself ‘this is it, this is the one, you’re going to nail it’ and then after, I’m greeted by the same feeling of ‘ah, better luck next time’.

Alternative career: I think I would have become an Architect or perhaps a Graphic Designer. I’ve always been into creative things but in a measured and precise way. I remember doing a plasticine stop-time animation workshop at school in my early teens and felt briefly destined to work for Aardman Animations.