piers adams

Piers Adams is one of the world’s leading recorder players, acclaimed for his “astonishing, all-out virtuosity” (New York Times), breadth of repertoire and compelling stage presence. Over a career spanning four decades, he has continually explored and extended the expressive possibilities of the recorder, challenging conventional ideas of how the instrument might sound, what music it might play and where it might belong.

Born in 1963 and brought up in England’s Thames Valley, Adams initially seemed destined for a very different career. After completing a degree in physics, he abandoned science for music, studying with some of the leading recorder players of the day, including the Dutch pioneer Kees Boeke, and winning numerous awards and competitions. But he was quick to forge his own path, finding his natural performing instincts increasingly at odds with some of the conventions of the early-music world.

A formative encounter came while performing at an early-music festival, when Adams heard a group of Hungarian gypsy musicians playing with extraordinary freedom, heart-on-sleeve emotion and joyous virtuosity. Their uninhibited approach made a lasting impression, helping to shape a performing style in which historical knowledge became a starting point rather than a constraint.

Following his Wigmore Hall debut in 1985 and an award-winning first recording of Vivaldi concertos, Adams began exploring repertoire far beyond the recorder’s familiar territory. His London recitals and recordings included rediscovered nineteenth-century Viennese music, revivals of important twentieth-century British works, new commissions and his own transcriptions of Romantic repertoire for recorder and piano.

His work with orchestras has ranged from baroque concertos to major contemporary commissions, most notably David Bedford’s Recorder Concerto, recorded for NMC with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He has appeared as soloist with ensembles including the Philharmonia, BBC Concert Orchestra, Academy of Ancient Music, City of London Sinfonia, Hong Kong Chamber Orchestra and Singapore Symphony Orchestra, performing in concert halls throughout Europe, Asia and beyond.

In 1997 Adams founded Red Priest, the iconoclastic baroque quartet that was to become central to his performing life. Renowned for its theatricality, virtuosity and irreverent approach to the baroque, the group has given well over a thousand concerts across four continents, appeared extensively on television and radio, and recorded a substantial catalogue on its own Red Priest Recordings label. Its 2017 album The Baroque Bohemians reached No. 1 in the UK classical charts.

Alongside Red Priest, Adams has continued to explore new musical territory. Bach Side of the Moon, created with sound artist Larry Lush, placed baroque music within an immersive contemporary sound-world and reached No. 5 in the international New Age chart. The development of the powerful Eagle Recorder, created by the late Dutch recorder-maker Adriana Breukink, opened still further possibilities, culminating in a major new concerto written for Adams and the instrument by composer Howard Moody and premiered in 2024.

His current projects reflect his continuing curiosity. With keyboardist Lyndy Mayle he created Baroque Alchemy, reimagining music from baroque and beyond through an extraordinary range of instrumental colours. With Red Priest harpsichordist David Wright he explores the wilder reaches of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music in Wild Men of the Baroque, while his concerto work continues with both established repertoire and new music written for the modern recorder.

Away from the concert platform, Adams has featured on several film soundtracks, gives regular masterclasses, workshops and lectures, and has created an online course, The Enlightened Recorder Player, drawing together his ideas about breath, technique and musical communication developed over a lifetime of performing.