Anthony Marwood

Anthony Marwood enjoys a wide-ranging international career as a soloist, director and chamber musician. Recent solo engagements include performances with the Hallé Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony, the Boston Symphony, St Louis Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, New World Symphony, London Philharmonic, Spanish National Orchestra, 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 Chloé van Soeterstède.

In summer 2021 he received great acclaim for his performance of the Ligeti Violin Concerto with Thomas Adès and the Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra, “None could outshine special guest Anthony Marwood…this concerto demands Olympian-calibre endurance from its soloist, and Marwood surely would have run away with the gold…Marwood’s violin dug deep through double stops and soared high with angelic resonance…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”, (Boston Globe).

As director and soloist Anthony regularly collaborates with many of the leading chamber orchestras, including the Australian Chamber Orchestra, 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 Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

As a chamber musician he has a wide circle of regular collaborators including Steven Isserlis, Aleksandar Madžar, 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 part-time in Koringberg, South Africa, 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 and UKARIA Cultural Centre in Adelaide. 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 is a Fellow of the Guildhall School of Music. 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.