David Watkin, one of the foremost cellists of his generation, has died at the age of 60. Born in Crowthorne, Berkshire, he studied music at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar, and studied cello under William Pleeth.

As both principal cellist and soloist Watkin performed with several leading ensembles, including the English Baroque Soloists, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and at prestigious venues such as Wigmore Hall, the Barbican, the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Carnegie Hall. As a guest artist he collaborated with Robert Levin, Fredericka von Stade and the Tokyo Quartet, among others. He was also a founding member of the Eroica Quartet, with whom he toured extensively across Europe and the United States. The quartet’s recordings of works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Debussy, and Ravel received critical acclaim.

The music of Bach was a perennial wellspring of his music-making. Performances of the Suites for Unaccompanied Cello took him to the Palace of Frederick the Great at Potsdam and to the Prague Spring Festival. He played three of the Suites as part of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, sitting by the font at which Bach was baptised at Eisenach, and featured in Gardiner’s TV programme Bach, a Passionate Life. His 2015 recording of JS Bach’s Cello Suites, performed on gut strings with two original historic instruments, won both a Gramophone Award and a BBC Music Magazine Award and was listed among Gramophone’s ‘50 Greatest Bach Recordings’ earlier this year.

When his performing career was tragically cut short through illness, Watkin turned increasingly to conducting and to pedagogy, appearing in a wide range of repertoire with leading ensembles including the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Swedish Baroque Orchestra, the Academy of Ancient Music, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, at the Royal Academy of Music, and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. At RCS he served as the Head of the Strings Department then as Chair of Chamber Music, where he was instrumental in transforming the programme into one of Europe’s most innovative. He is remembered there for his charismatic, nurturing presence as a teacher, and as a colleague for his warm personality.

Watkin also published scholarly articles on the performance of music with which he was most closely associated, contributing a chapter to Performing Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2005). From his time at Cambridge, Watkin began reviving the 18th-century practice of realizing figured bass on the cello, a practice that became a feature of his performances and recordings, and on which he contributed an article in Early Music. His pioneering work has inspired younger cellists to take up the technique, one of the most distinctive facets of his enduring legacy.