Surrey Mozart Players

About Us 

The Surrey Mozart Players is a chamber orchestra, founded and directed in the early 1970s by Richard Temple-Savage. It has earned a well-deserved reputation for imaginative, exciting and entertaining programmes, featuring repertoire from Baroque and Classical, to modern masterpieces, and including premiers of newly-commissioned works. 


Members are drawn from talented amateur and semi-professional musicians living in or around the Surrey area. 


After its founder retired, the orchestra appointed Paul Hoskins as Musical Director in 1992, a post he held until 2002, as well as working with such established conductors as Peter Stark and Robin Ticciati. From 2006, the orchestra enjoyed an extensive 12-year collaboration with Kenneth Woods, whose tenure came to an end in June 2018.  Between September 2018 and February 2023 the orchestra worked with guest conductors with a break between March 2020 and June 2021 due to the Pandemic.  The current Music Director, Philip Ellis, was appointed in March 2023.


It has always been SMP policy to give a platform to and encourage emerging young soloists and the orchestra has lately had the pleasure of performing with Peter Facer, Emmanuel Bach, Alexei Watkins, Giacomo Susani, Ionel Manciu, Ben Tarlton, Lucy Humphris, Daniel de Borah, Nick Cartledge, Sally Pryce, Antonina Suhanova and Ignas Maknickas. It has also been the orchestra’s privilege to work with other internationally renowned artists: Nicola Benedetti, Alexander Sitkovetsky, Chloe Hanslip, Laura van der Heijden, James Brawn, Mark Bebbington, Julian Jacobson, Simon Desbruslais, Louise Alder and Michael Collins.