Situated on the west-end gallery of the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Michel-en-Thiérache, the beautiful Boizard organ dating from 1714 and with 90% original pipework was as perfect an instrument as one could find for this recording of the first organ mass by André Raison (1688) and the two suites by his pupil Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (c.1710).

David Ponsford is an organist, harpsichordist, musicologist and conductor, and an authority on keyboard music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He held the Greenwood Exhibition at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and was extremely fortunate to be able to study organ with Peter Hurford, Lionel Rogg and Piet Kee, and harpsichord with Kenneth Gilbert and Gustav Leonhardt.

On graduating from Cambridge, he was appointed Assistant Organist at Wells Cathedral. Later, he studied for a PhD on performance practice in French Baroque organ music with Professor Peter Williams. He is now Associate Lecturer at Cardiff University, where he conducts the University Chamber Orchestra and gives lectures in performance practice. He also teaches organ and harpsichord at Bristol University, and gives series of lectures at Madingley Hall, Cambridge.

He has been Publications Officer for the British Institute of Organ Studies, and together with Anne Page he founded the Cambridge Academy of Organ Studies. Recently, he has given concerts in Singapore, Poland, Germany, New York and Montreal, in addition to Westminster Cathedral and the London Oratory. His edition of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas was published by Ut Orpheus, Bologna, in 2007, and his book ‘French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV’ was published by Cambridge University Press in May 2011.