A community orchestra with a passion for performance

Recently praised for his 'musical brilliance' (Seen and Heard International), Joe Davies is a conductor working across the UK. He is Musical Director of the UK Proms in the Park Orchestra, Leamington Sinfonia, Canterbury Symphony Orchestra and Midland Concert Orchestra, an Assistant Conductor for the English Symphony Orchestra, and Artistic Director and Founder of the Cumbria Opera Group.

Previous Music Director positions include Worcester Philharmonic and Contemporary Music East Midlands, both 2019–24, while recent and upcoming engagements include the National Schools' Symphony Orchestra, Oxford University Orchestra, Winchester Symphony Orchestra and the City of Southampton Orchestra.

He graduated with a First Class degree in music from St Peter's College, Oxford, before studying Orchestral Conducting under Michael Seal at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, where he graduated with Distinction.

Freddy Kempf became Patron of Canterbury Symphony Orchestra in 2025. He is one of today's most successful pianists, performing to sell-out audiences all over the world, with an unusually broad repertoire and a reputation as an explosive and physical performer as well as a serious, sensitive and profoundly musical artist.

Born in London in 1977, Freddy made his concerto debut with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of 8 and came to national prominence in 1992 when he won the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition. In 1998 his third prize, rather than first, in the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow provoked protests from the audience and an outcry in the Russian press, which proclaimed him 'the hero of the competition'.

He has collaborated with conductors including Järvi, Dutoit, Sawallisch, Sanderling, Chailly, Ashkenazy and Petrenko, and has played with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, La Scala Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, NHK Symphony and the Dresden Philharmonic, in halls from the Concertgebouw and London's Barbican to the Sydney Opera House and Tokyo's Suntory Hall.

Floriane (Flo) Peycelon is a versatile professional musician, accomplished both as an experienced teacher and a busy freelance violinist. She studied the violin in France at the Lyon National Conservatoire of Music and Drama under Jean Bisciglia, Leader of the Lyon National Orchestra, and after completing an MA in Politics and International Relations whilst playing in the Lyon Sinfonietta, made Kent her home.

She is visiting Violin tutor at the University of Kent, where she also directs the String Sinfonia, teaches privately, and since February 2022 has directed the Folkestone Young Strings Orchestra. Her students have worked alongside the Glyndebourne Touring Orchestra, the composer John Woolrich and the Sacconi Quartet.

Flo has given numerous solo and chamber recitals in the UK and abroad, including the Bach Double Violin Concerto, the Mendelssohn and Beethoven Violin Concertos, Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending and all four of Vivaldi's Seasons.