CELLO-BRATION
Tim Blomfield, baroque cello · Salut! Baroque (Sydney)

Sunday 19 July 2026, 18h
Familiar Strangers, Paris 10e

An intimate evening of solo baroque cello with Tim Blomfield, co-founder and co-artistic director of Australia’s acclaimed early music ensemble Salut! Baroque.

The programme traces the emergence of the cello as a solo voice: from Bologna in the 1680s, where Gianbattista degli Antonii and Domenico Gabrielli wrote the very first music for unaccompanied cello, through the towering suites of J.S. Bach, to Martin Berteau and Jean-Pierre Duport, the founding figures of the French cello school, whose art flourished here in Paris. Three centuries later, that lineage returns to the city that shaped it.

Programme
Gianbattista degli Antonii · J.S. Bach · Domenico Gabrielli · Martin Berteau · Jean-Pierre Duport

Biography
Tim Blomfield is one of Australia's foremost baroque cellists and the country's leading proponent of the bass violin. A graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium, he pursued his fascination with the baroque cello with Jaap ter Linden at the Royal Conservatorium in The Hague. In 1995 he co-founded Salut! Baroque, an ensemble that has delighted Australian audiences ever since, presenting annual concert series in Sydney and Canberra with the country's finest baroque musicians. Alongside performing, Tim produces urtext editions of unpublished 17th- and 18th-century scores, many of which are used in Salut! Baroque's programmes.