Our approach
Our practice lives in the overlap between scholarship and instinct. We read, we research, and then we go into a room together and ask:
In rehearsal and performance we:
• Treat each piece as a dramatic argument, not just a sequence of beautiful moments.
• Use historical articulation, gesture and rhetoric to shape speech-like musical phrasing.
• Embrace risk, spontaneity and ornamentation as generative tools rather than surface decoration.
• Listen closely to the acoustics of each venue, allowing the room itself to become an active partner.
The result is that concerts become sites of shared discovery, both for us and for our audiences. We’re not there to confirm what everyone already “knows” about Baroque and Classical music. We’re there to encounter it as something alive: unpredictable, emotionally immediate, and very much of now.
The ensemble
Horizon Ensemble is the current chapter in a long-running artistic conversation. We are four musicians whose paths first crossed more than thirty years ago when we arrived in the Netherlands to go deep into Baroque performance practice. Since then, we’ve built lives as performers and educators across the international Early Music scene. As artists-in-residence at the English Church in Amsterdam, we develop programmes that respond to place, community and context. This residency gives us the continuity to refine ideas over time, trace evolving relationships with repertoire, and explore long-form collaborations with presenters and audiences.
Geoffrey Burgess, musicologist and baroque oboist,
February 2026
Works by: Rameau, Guillemain and Leclair
Madame de Pompadour is remembered as the favored courtesan of Louis XV, but much more importantly, was also a passionate patron of the arts. A woman ascending the political ranks without being born into the aristocracy, she was denigrated by her contemporaries and feared for her power and influence. Horizon Ensemble delves into her world of 18th century Versailles, a society on the brink of collapse.
