The violinist Catherine Mackintosh and fortepianist Geoffrey Govier formed Duo Amadè in the 1980s to concentrate upon performing the violin sonatas of Mozart. It is their belief that the performance of these works on period instruments gives them a freshness and vitality that might otherwise be lost. Currently recording the sonatas for Chandos, they have recently performed them at the Mozart Festival in Cluj, Romania; the Royal College of Music, and the National Trust’s Hatchlands Park. In the 1990s, for concerts in the Wigmore Hall amongst other places, the Duo was also joined by other players to perform a number of piano concertos by Mozart in the composer’s chamber music arrangements.

Trained at the Royal College of Music, Catherine Mackintosh took up the viol and baroque violin, attracted by the expressive possibilities which early instruments can bring to pre-classical repertoire, and over the past four decades has taken part in a fascinating era of discovery, pioneering many ground-breaking projects. She was leader of the Academy of Ancient Music from 1973 to 1988, and has directed the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, of which she is a founder member, in concert halls and at festivals all over the world. She was professor of baroque and classical violin and viola at the Royal College of Music from 1977 to 2001, has directed numerous performances at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and in September 2008 took up a post as professor of baroque violin at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. Her extensive discography includes more than forty CDs with The Purcell Quartet for Chandos.

Geoffrey Govier has been a passionate advocate of the early piano for twenty years, his teachers having included Melvyn Tan in London, Stanley Hoogland in Amsterdam and, more recently, Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he gained his doctorate. Active throughout the world both as a soloist and chamber musician, he has worked with the singers Gerald Finley, Charles Daniels and Catherine Bott, the horn player Andrew Clark, and the chamber groups Ensemble Galant and The Revolutionary Drawing Room. As an enthusiastic teacher, he has given a number of master-classes and is professor of fortepiano at the Royal College of Music. His introduction to Hummel’s Ausführlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-forte-Spiel (1828) was published in 1998 (Tokyo: Sinfonia) and he is currently working on an extended commentary on Czerny’s Vollständige theoretisch-praktische Pianoforte-Schule, Op. 500 (1839).