Melanie Ragge

Melanie has performed in far flung venues such as Vancouver Island, Malta, and Northern Sweden as well as UK venues such as St John’s Smith Square, the Royal Opera House and Wigmore Hall. A founding member of one of the UK’s leading wind ensembles, the New London Chamber Ensemble, she has released several CDs, including Nielsen’s Wind & Piano Chamber Music.

Originally a medical student at King’s College Cambridge, Melanie ultimately graduated with a Master of Philosophy degree in Musicology. She was subsequently awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship at the Royal College of Music where she studied oboe with Michael Winfield, contemporary oboe with Edwin Roxburgh and piano with Phyllis Sellick.

Melanie has since collaborated with numerous artists including the Dante, Schidlof and Emperor string quartets, pianists Angela Hewitt, Michael Dussek, Julian Jacobson and Ann Martin-Davis, baritone Gerald Finlay, and tenor James Gilchrist. Her performances have included recitals with the New London Chamber Ensemble at Wigmore Hall, the premiere of the ensemble’s newly commissioned Nonet by Martin Butler with the Dante Quartet at the Cheltenham Festival, touring and recording Mahler’s 10th Symphony at Philharmonie Hall in Berlin with the International Mahler Orchestra, and recitals at the Royal Opera House with pianist Susanna Stranders and the Ellipsis Ensemble. Her most recent recordings include a disc of Martin Butler’s chamber music with the New London Chamber Ensemble and Navarra Quartet, and ‘Revellings & Reckonings’, a new work for Quintet and percussion, on Ailís Ní Ríain’s debut disc – The Last Time I Died – with the NLCE and Dame Evelyn Glennie.

She regularly coaches and gives masterclasses; she has been a guest tutor for numerous projects, including Chamber Music International, the Aberystwyth Music Festival, Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater and the Penderecki Musik Akademie, and was for many years Associate Director and woodwind tutor for the National Youth Chamber Orchestra. As well as her work at the Royal Academy, she teaches at the Purcell School of Music, and coaches for Cambridge University. Her scientific interest continues in the form of ongoing research into the use of Electromyography to help to reduce strain injuries in musical training.