Benjamin Narvey, lutenist and musicologist, was born in Montréal, and grew up in Calgary.  After conservatory in Canada, he studied at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama (London) with David Miller, and has refined his understanding of period performance with Nigel North, Paul O’Dette and Hopkinson Smith.

Benjamin has performed as a continuist under directors such as Paul Agnew, Christian Curnyn, Ton Koopman, Sir Roger Norrington and Kenneth Weiss.  He has also performed extensively with Sir John Eliot Gardiner's two period ensembles, the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestra and the English Baroque Soloists. Benjamin works with a variety of French ensembles such as Akadêmia (dir. Françoise Lasserre), Les Ambassadeurs (dir. Alexis Kossenko), La Chapelle Rhénane (dir. Benoît Haller), Le Concert de la Loge (dir. Julien Chauvin), Les Folies françoises (dir. Patrick Cohën-Akenine), Fuoco e Cenere (dir. Jay Bernfeld), Ensemble Il Caravaggio (dir. Camille Delaforge & Anna Reinhold), Ensemble Marguerite Louise (dir. Gaétan Jarry), Les Ombres (dir. Sylvain Sartre & Margaux Blanchard), and Les Paladins (dir. Jérôme Correas).

Benjamin performs regularly at prestigious venues such as the Opéra de Paris, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the Opéra Royal de Versailles, the Royal Albert Hall, Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, and also at important festivals such as the BBC Proms (UK), London Handel Festival (UK), Aldeburgh Festival (UK), Brighton Early Music Festival (UK), Festival d’Ambronay (France), Festival de Sablé  (France), Festival de la Chaise-Dieu (France), Leipzig Bachfest (Germany), Festival de Musica Antigua Ubeda y Baeza (Spain), FEMAS (Spain), Anima Mundi (Italy) and the Vancouver Early Music Festival (Canada). 

Benjamin is also an experienced theatre and film musician, having performed many times with the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (London), including the production of "The Duchess of Malfi" (with original music by Robert Johnson) that inaugurated the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2014.  He also collaborates regularly with France 3 and ARTE, and he has been a featured guest artist on "The Early Music Show" (BBC Radio 3) and on Radio France Internationale.

Benjamin is also an academic specialising in the French Baroque.  His doctoral thesis, "The French Lute during the Reign of Louis le Grand" (University of Oxford, 2010) is the first cultural history of the French lute during the Grand Siècle.  In 2008, he won the Goldberg Musical Essay Competition.  He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) in 2009, and a fellow at the Institute of Musical Research (University of London) in 2010-11.

His first solo disc, "Psyché:  Weiss and the French School" (Gamut Music USA) was released at the Boston Early Music Festival in June 2017.

Upcoming performance highlights for the 2020-21 season include a tour of France and Spain with Philippe Jaroussky and Le Concert de la Loge, a recording and tour of Italy with Sandrine Piau and Les Paladins, and debut performances at Rome’s Teatro Argentina and London’s Wigmore Hall.

Benjamin resides in Paris.

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