The Nash Ensemble, Resident Chamber Ensemble at London’s Wigmore Hall, is regarded as a standard-bearer of British music-making, and has been acclaimed by The Independent as a ‘chamber music group beyond compare’. The Nash Ensemble has built up a remarkable reputation as one of Britain’s finest ensembles and, through the dedication of its founder and artistic director Amelia Freedman and the calibre of its players, has gained a similar reputation all over the world. The repertoire is vast and the imaginative, innovative and unusual programmes are as finely architectured as the beautiful Nash terraces in London from which the group takes its name. The Nash Ensemble is not classically restricted; it performs with equal sensitivity and musicality works from Haydn to the avant-garde. Indeed, it is one of the major contributors towards the recognition and promotion of many composers at different stages of their careers. To date, the group has premiered over 330 new works by 225 different composers, including over 240 commissions written specially for the ensemble, thereby providing a legacy for generations to come.

An impressive collection of recordings illustrates the same varied and colourful combination of classical masterpieces, little-known neglected gems and important contemporary works. An extraordinary variety of recordings for Hyperion includes a major survey of works by British composers of the first half of the twentieth century; string quintets and sextets, including those by Mozart, Brahms, Bruch, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Korngold; works by Czech composers incarcerated in the Theresienstadt concentration camp between 1941 and 1945; and little-known chamber works by Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann and Ferdinand Ries.

The Nash is known throughout the world through its concerts and recordings; since 1979 it has presented a celebrated series every year at Wigmore Hall exploring the many facets of the chamber music repertoire, including rarely performed pieces for voice and ensemble.

The ensemble has won many honours, including the Edinburgh Festival Critics’ music award ‘for general artistic excellence’, and in 1990 and 2003 the Royal Philharmonic Society’s small ensemble award ‘for the breadth of its taste and its immaculate performance of a wide range of music’.