Ruth Alford has been specialising in period instrument performance since the early 1990s, after establishing herself as continuo cellist and chamber musician with many orchestras and ensembles in London. She graduated from Manchester University with an honours degree in Music, having studied with Bernard Gregor-Smith and the Lindsay String Quartet. Further studies followed with David Strange, the Amadeus Quartet, Jenny Ward-Clarke and William Pleeth. She now performs and records regularly as a principal player with the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique as well as other period instrument ensembles, including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Brandenburg Consort and the Revolutionary Drawing Room.