Kate Bennett Wadsworth is a cellist and gambist devoted to historical performance of all periods, with a special research interest in 19th-century performance practice. She has appeared at festivals throughout Europe and North America with period instrument ensembles such as the Gabrieli Consort, B’Rock, Arion, Tafelmusik, Apollo’s Fire, Aradia, Masques, and the Theatre of Early Music, and her continuo playing can be heard on the Naxos, ATMA, Artemis/Vanguard, early-music.com, and Deux-Elles labels. As a soloist, she has appeared with Arion Baroque Orchestra, Les Bostonades, Norwich Baroque, and Les Goûts Réunis Luxembourg.

Kate studied modern cello with Laurence Lesser at the New England Conservatory and baroque cello with Jaap ter Linden at the Royal Dutch Conservatory in the Hague, after completing a bachelor’s degree in Scandinavian studies at Harvard College. In 2018, she completed a practice-led PhD under Clive Brown at the University of Leeds, looking at the notoriously marked-up editions of the cellist Friedrich Grützmacher as a window onto 19th-century performance practice. Drawing on similarly marked-up editions, as well as treatises, memoirs, early recordings, and other historical sources, she prepared annotated editions of the Brahms Cello Sonatas, in collaboration with Clive Brown and Neal Peres da Costa (Bärenreiter, 2015). Her recording of the Brahms Sonatas with pianist Yi-heng Yang, released on the Deux-Elles label in 2018, has been praised for its “narrative quality” (Gramophone) and its “ardor and depth” (Early Music America).

Kate has recently completed a three-year research project on the Schumann Cello Concerto, called “The flexible text: reuniting oral and written traditions in 19th-century music”. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust and hosted by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the project examined early editions, handwritten scores, and hand-annotations to the concerto by 19th-century cellists, culminating in an article (Orpheus Institute 2024), a critical edition of the concerto, both in its original forms (cello and orchestra, cello and piano) and in Kate’s arrangement for cello and string quartet (Bärenreiter 2024), and a recording of her quartet arrangement with the Consone Quartet (Deux-Elles 2025).

“Her sense of musical gesture and line has the strength and grace of a wild animal: Her melodies soar, not like a rocket, but like an eagle, responding to every turn of harmony and thought the way the bird responds to changing currents of air.” -Early Music America