Biography
‘I was very impressed to hear Tomo Keller’
Yehudi Menuhin
One of the most admired violinists of his generation, Tomo Keller performs as a soloist, chamber and orchestral musician, leading groundbreaking performances and recording projects. He regularly performs with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and other major orchestras around the world.
In 2026-27 Tomo will perform with Tenebrae, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (under Thomas Adès) and the Tokyo Sinfonia, as well as with Isata Kanneh-Mason, Isabel Charisius and Varduhi Yeritsyan. A new album of works by Kurt Atterberg in which Tomo is the soloist in the Suite for Violin and Viola and directs the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra is due for release later this year on the Ondine label. With the Academy of St Martin in the Fields he will perform 20 concerts in the US alone this season, with both the Chamber Ensemble and the orchestra, and with Conrad Tao.
Since his debuts at the Musikverein and Konzerthaus Vienna at the age of 17, Tomo Keller has performed at major concert halls all around the world and has been invited, as both soloist and chamber musician to music festivals including the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Edinburgh Festival and Bravo! Vail Colorado. He has also been a frequent guest on radio and television broadcasts on ARD, BBC, NHK and ORF.
As a soloist Tomo has performed with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Beethovenhalle Orchestra Bonn, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, St Petersburg Camerata, London Symphony Orchestra, Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Concert tours have taken him all across Europe, as well as Russia, Asia, America and the Middle East. As a chamber musician he regularly appears with the Chamber Ensemble of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and has performed alongside Joshua Bell, Alexandra Dariescu, Benjamin Grosvenor, HK Gruber, Håkan Hardenberger, Janine Jansen, Kim Kashkashian, Denis Kozhukhin, Jan Lisiecki, Daniel Müller-Schott, Murray Perahia, Lawrence Power, Timothy Ridout and members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
Tomo Keller is a much sought-after orchestral leader and director, having led the London Symphony Orchestra (2009-2015) and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (2014-2019) and has also appeared with more than 30 orchestras as guest leader all over Europe, the US and Asia, including with the Concertgebouw Orkest Amsterdam, the Orchestre de Paris, the DSO Berlin, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. In 2016 Tomo was appointed Director and Leader of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.
Over the last few seasons he has been directing new initiatives with various orchestras with great success, leading both as soloist and from the concertmaster’s chair. These orchestras have included string and chamber orchestras (Amsterdam Sinfonietta), symphony and opera orchestras (City of Birmingham Orchestra, Wuppertal Sinfoniker) as well as festival and youth orchestras (Grafenegg Akademie Orchester, Pyeong-Chang Festival Orchestra).
During 2021/22, Tomo was artist-in-residence at the Loh-Orchestra Sondershausen in Germany, appearing as soloist, director and conductor, and premiered a new piece written for him by Christoph Ehrenfellner. Wiener G’schichten also received its UK premiere in London with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in 2022 and was heard again at the 2024 New Year’s Concert in Wuppertal.
Tomo’s recordings include solo works by Bach, Bartok and Ysaye, orchestral recordings including Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète with Sir John Eliot Gardiner/LSO and Grammy Award winning Avant Gershwin with Patti Austin and the WDR Big Band. In 2020 Deutsche Grammophon released a DVD/CD box set of all the Beethoven piano concertos to great critical acclaim, featuring pianist Jan Lisiecki and Tomo Keller directing the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. In 2026 Signum released a recording with Alexandra Dariescu (Clara Schumann Romances).
Tomo Keller was born in Stuttgart to German-Japanese musicians, and started playing the violin at the age of six. At ten years old he gave his first performances with orchestra. He studied at Vienna’s University for Music and Performing Arts and New York’s Juilliard School of Music. Numerous top prizes and awards followed, at the Fritz Kreisler Competition, the Johannes Brahms Competition and the German Music Competition Berlin where he was awarded the Grand Prize. He was also one of few instrumentalists to receive the Aalto Stage Prize for young musicians.
He has given violin, chamber music and orchestral master classes at all major London Music Colleges as well as at Yale university, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and numerous other schools in the US and East Asia. In 2022 he was appointed Professor of violin at the HEMU Sion in Switzerland.
Tomo plays the ‘Braga-Bell’ Stradivari of 1726, kindly loaned through the Beare’s International Violin Society.