Who is Huw Saunders?
Huw left school in 1975 to study marine biology at Liverpool University, but before long his passion for music took him to Trinity College of Music in London instead. He started out as a horn player but his passion was the making of instruments more than playing them. Upon leaving college he joined EMI as a Transfer Engineer at their cassette factory in Hayes.
A chance visit to The Early Music Exhibition at the Horticultural Hall near Victoria in 1979 sealed his fate. There he met a whole lot of apparently ordinary people like himself who were making beautiful musical instruments, and he wanted to join them. He began his first instrument, a lute, the following year. Later he went to London Guildhall University to study harpsichord making with Lewis Jones and Andrew Wooderson. His first harpsichord, similar to but less ambitious than the present one was eventually bought by Malcolm Greenhalgh who hires out and tunes harpsichords in London and has been heard at the Barbican and the Albert Hall, and has appeared in a television film about Mozart in London. Another recent instrument, a large German double, was made for Dr Penny Wright for her barn concert hall in Gloucestershire, and has been played there and at the Wigmore Hall by Mahan Esfahani, (BBC New Generation Artist 2008-2010) who also used it for his recent recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations (Deutsche Grammophon).
Huw lives with his wife Martha in Stoke Newington where he has his workshop at the back of the house and his honeybees in the garden.
Huw left school in 1975 to study marine biology at Liverpool University, but before long his passion for music took him to Trinity College of Music in London instead. He started out as a horn player but his passion was the making of instruments more than playing them. Upon leaving college he joined EMI as a Transfer Engineer at their cassette factory in Hayes.
A chance visit to The Early Music Exhibition at the Horticultural Hall near Victoria in 1979 sealed his fate. There he met a whole lot of apparently ordinary people like himself who were making beautiful musical instruments, and he wanted to join them. He began his first instrument, a lute, the following year. Later he went to London Guildhall University to study harpsichord making with Lewis Jones and Andrew Wooderson. His first harpsichord, similar to but less ambitious than the present one was eventually bought by Malcolm Greenhalgh who hires out and tunes harpsichords in London and has been heard at the Barbican and the Albert Hall, and has appeared in a television film about Mozart in London. Another recent instrument, a large German double, was made for Dr Penny Wright for her barn concert hall in Gloucestershire, and has been played there and at the Wigmore Hall by Mahan Esfahani, (BBC New Generation Artist 2008-2010) who also used it for his recent recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations (Deutsche Grammophon).
Huw lives with his wife Martha in Stoke Newington where he has his workshop at the back of the house and his honeybees in the garden.