Biography

Alex Rolton is a highly versatile cellist who enjoys a lively and varied performing career alongside his studies at the Royal Academy of Music. This year has seen Alex touring in Austria, Norway, France, Germany and China whilst also performing extensively in the UK. He is the winner of this year’s prestigious Muriel Taylor Scholarship Award.

Since 2009 Alex has been studying on a Full Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music with Professor Felix Schmidt. He has also performed in masterclasses with some of the world’s most renowned cellists including Truls Mørk, Colin Carr and Raphael Wallfisch.

At the Academy he has won prizes in the Herbert Walenn Solo Bach Competition, the ‘Florence Hooten Concerto Competition’ with Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Roccoco Variations; and the ‘Douglas Cameron Prize’. As principal cellist of the Academy’s Opera Concert and Symphony Orchestras, Alex gave the world premiere Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ opera ‘Kommilitonen’ along with highly acclaimed performance of Hindermith’s Kammermusik no. 1 conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier. This June, again as principal cellist of the Academy Concert Orchestra Alex will perform Strauss’s Heldenleben under the baton of Semyon Bytchkov.

A committed chamber musician, Alex performs regularly with Romanian pianist Florian Mitrea. Together they won the Academy’s Willfred Parry Brahms competition and the pair can often be found with additional musicians as piano trios, quartets and quintets. Alex was a founder member of the Artesian Quartet with whom he performed extensively across the country playing most notably at the BBC Proms and the Wigmore Hall. As a regular performer of baroque repertoire Alex recently began studying the baroque cello at the Academy where he now performs with the Baroque Ensembles and in the Academy’s Kohn Foundation Bach Cantata Series.

For four years, Alex was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. With the NYO he performed widely throughout the UK playing at major venues such as the Royal Albert Hall, the Barbican and the Sage Gateshead; and performing at events including Glastonbury Music Festival and the BBC Proms. As Co-principal cello he was awarded the ‘Bulgin Medal’ by the Worshipful Company of Musicians for ‘most outstanding overall contribution to the Orchestra’.

Alex plays his recently aquired English cello built in the London Piccadilly School of c. 1730.

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