Richard Boothby has been playing the viol ever since David Fallows handed him a tenor viol in 1977. He was trying to help him with a thesis entitled ‘Wagner’s Ring and it’s tonality’ at Manchester University. After further study with Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Salzburg, he helped to found The Purcell Quartet in 1984 and Fretwork in 1985.

With Fretwork, he has endeavoured to enrich the viol-consort repertory with new music from today’s finest composers, from Elvis Costello to George Benjamin, from Alexander Goehr to Nico Muhly.

And with the Purcell Quartet, he recorded nearly 50 albums for Hyperion and Chandos; and with Fretwork over 70 albums for Virgin Classics, Harmonia Mundi USA and most recently, Signum Classics.

He has arranged and transcribed much of the great keyboard music of J. S. Bach for viols, which were recorded under the title ‘Alio Modo’; and then his arrangement of the Goldberg Variations was recorded by Fretwork.

In 1998 he directed performances of Monteverdi's “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” with the Purcell Quartet; and in 2001 directed them in a fully-staged production of “L’Orfeo” in Japan, with Mark Padmore in the title role.

In 2016, he performed a programme of the fabulous French & English repertory for two bass viols with Christophe Coin, and his recording of the complete lyra viol music of William Lawes for Harmonia Mundi, USA, was released in the same year.

The following year he recorded Telemann’s recently-discovered Fantasias for Signum Records. He recorded the first volume of Alfonso Ferrabosco’s major lyra viol publication of 1609, the result of a lockdown project.

In 2024 he performed all the Teleman solo Fantasias in Germany and Slovenia, and in 2025 he taught a course for viol players in the beautiful Schloß Seehaus in Frankonia in Germany.

He is professor of Viola da Gamba at the Royal College in London.