David Vickers

Dr David Vickers teaches various undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the RNCM. His main research is Baroque Music, and in particular Handel: he editor of New Perspectives on Handel’s Music: Essays in Honour of Donald Burrows (Boydell Press, 2022), co-editor of The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia (2009), and editor of an anthology of Handelian literature (Ashgate’s ‘Baroque Composers’ series, 2011). His doctoral thesis examined the composer’s own different performing versions of Partenope, Arianna in Creta, Esther and Deborah.

An author of essays or books about aspects of Purcell, Vivaldi, Mozart and Haydn, David’s other interests include seventeenth-century vocal music, baroque sacred repertoire, and eighteenth-century opera. He is an essayist for most leading classical record labels (Virgin, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Hyperion, Harmonia Mundi, Chandos, BIS, etc.) and has been a critic for Gramophone since 2003.

A council member of the Handel Institute, David serves as a project consultant for many international baroque musicians, has appeared frequently on BBC Radio 3, and is in demand as a guest lecturer both at home and abroad. He sings in Leeds Baroque (of which he was a founder member) and conducts choirs in the Huddersfield area. He also has an unhealthy interest in Prog Rock and electric guitars.

David's research interests focus principally on the career and music of Handel and his contemporaries in Germany, Italy, France and Britain. Current and future projects relate to reconstructing different compositional and performing versions of baroque operas and oratorio-style works, investigating the careers of early eighteenth-century singers (such as Senesino, John Beard and Giulia Frasi), aspects of historical performance practice, and the history, reception, and future of historically-informed performances on period instruments within the classical recording industry.