Kate Clark

Kate Clark (born 1962 in Sydney, Australia) is a solo, chamber, and orchestral flutist based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is a specialist in the performance and performance practice of historical flutes from the renaissance to the early modern period, and teacher of historical flutes at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Musical career Clark received a bachelor of music on modern and baroque flutes from the University of Sydney in 1985. She then studied baroque and classical flutes with Barthold Kuijken at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, receiving a soloist's diploma cum laude. She undertook a final period of study and research at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, under the guidance of flutist and musicologist Anne Smith. In 1993, Clark won first prize in the international MAfestival Brugge Competition (Bruges International Early Music Competition). Since 1988 Clark has performed and recorded throughout the world as a soloist with chamber ensembles and orchestras, including the Apollo Ensemble, the Attaignant Consort, Cantus Cölln (Konrad Junghänel), the FestspielOrchester Göttingen (of the Göttingen International Handel Festival), Les Musiciens du Louvre (Mark Minkowski), Musica Amphion, and Osmosis. She is the principal flute of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (Ton Koopman) and a guest principal with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, and she returns regularly to Australia as a guest of the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Canberra Festival, and the Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra. She is regularly singled out in reviews for her expressive playing. Clark is co-founder and artistic director of the Attaignant Consort, a renaissance flute consort whose three-CD set (released on the Ramée label) documenting the solo and consort repertoire of the renaissance flute was crowned with a Diapason d’Or in 2013. She has been featured on the early music radio program Harmonia, and in the music magazines TIBIA and FLUIT, and she has written articles for various publications, including many CD liner notes. Additionally, she co-authored with Amanda Markwick The Renaissance Flute: A Contemporary Guide, a book on the performance practice and theory of the renaissance flute, published by Oxford University Press in 2020.