August
Guan

August Guan is an organist, harpsichordist and musicologist whose playing is inseparable from his scholarship. He works in historically informed performance across four centuries of keyboard music, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, and is drawn above all to repertoire that has been forgotten and to the work of bringing it back to life.

His research grows out of playing rather than the library. Much of his doctorate was given over to recovering neglected eighteenth-century keyboard arrangements and returning them to performance, recorded on a 1766 Kirckman harpsichord. He can put before an audience music unheard for two centuries and explain, from the inside, how and why it once sounded as it did.

August trained as a conductor at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing before turning to the harpsichord, taking a master's at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and a performance-based doctorate at Cardiff University, with a thesis titled English Arrangements of Instrumental Music for the Keyboard, 1708–1762: Method and Practice.

He is titulaire organist at St Gregory's, Cheltenham, where his recital series ranges across four centuries on two contrasting historic instruments: a Dutch Baroque chancel organ and an original 1866 Father Willis. He has previously been sub-organist at Brecon Cathedral and director of music at Oakham Team Ministry. His fascination with how older instruments make their sound extends to building them: he has made a harpsichord after the 1769 Taskin model.

Alongside performing, August teaches one to one: organ at St Gregory's, Cheltenham, and keyboard lessons, including piano and harpsichord, in pupils' own homes across Cheltenham and Oxford.