Anthony Marwood MBE

Anthony Marwood enjoys a wide-ranging international career as soloist, director and chamber musician. Recent solo engagements include performances with the Boston Symphony, St Louis Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, New World Symphony, London Philharmonic, Spanish National Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony and Sydney Symphony. He has worked with conductors such as Valery Gergiev, Sir Andrew Davis, Thomas Søndergård, David Robertson, Gerard Korsten, Ilan Volkov, Jaime Martin, Douglas Boyd and Gemma New.

In summer 2021 he received great acclaim for his performance of the Ligeti Violin Concerto with Thomas Adès and the Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra. The Boston Globe review commented “None could outshine special guest Anthony Marwood, the featured soloist in Ligeti’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. Ending as it does with an extended and totally exposed cadenza — Marwood used one composed by Adès — this concerto demands Olympian-caliber endurance from its soloist, and Marwood surely would have run away with the gold. Under Adès’ baton, the orchestra created a backdrop of dramatic and organic sound; the Intermezzo saw the strings’ whispering tree-sounds morph into bright rocket flares, and the long Passacaglia slowly smoldered into a blazing inferno. Against all this, Marwood’s violin dug deep through double stops and soared high with angelic resonance — think many-eyed seraphim, not Precious Moments figurine. The orchestra’s closing gesture had scarcely dissipated before the fellows sharing my row were on their feet, cheering at full blast. They knew excellence when they heard it.”

As director and soloist Anthony has appeared with many of the leading chamber orchestras, including the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, the Tapiola Sinfonietta, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Les Violons du Roy, Orchestre de chambre de Paris and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

As a chamber musician, he has a wide circle of regular collaborators including Steven Isserlis, Aleksandar Madžar, Inon Barnatan, Alexander Melnikov, Denes Varjon and James Crabb.

Many leading composers have written concertos for him, including Thomas Adès (Anthony also made the first recording of the work, for EMI) Steven Mackey, Sally Beamish and Samuel Carl Adams. Anthony is a prolific recording artist, with close to forty albums on the Hyperion label alone – most recently a recording of Walton’s Violin Concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins. The disc received wide critical acclaim, including a 5-star review in The Guardian and a ‘Recommended Recording’ in The Strad Magazine, whilst the Sunday Times described him as “a thrilling, virtuosic soloist”. His latest release is Steven Mackey’s “Beautiful Passing” with David Robertson and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra on the Canary Classics label.

Anthony studied with Emanuel Hurwitz and David Takeno in London. He has collaborated with numerous actors, Indian classical dancer Mayuri Boonham, Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor, sculptress Nicole Farhi and South African guitarist Derek Gripper. He was the violinist of the Florestan Trio for sixteen years and won the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist award in 2006.

Anthony, who resides in Sussex and Amsterdam, is co-Artistic Director of the Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival in East Sussex, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2023. He performs annually at the Yellow Barn Festival in Vermont and enjoys a close association with the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne. Anthony was appointed as a William Lawes Chair of Chamber Music at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 2022, awarded an MBE in the 2018 Queen’s New Year’s Honours List and was made a Fellow of the Guildhall School of Music in 2013. He uses a bow by Joseph René LaFleur and plays a 1736 Carlo Bergonzi violin, kindly bought by a syndicate of purchasers, and a 2018 violin made by Christian Bayon.

Artist Website: www.anthonymarwood.com

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