Biography
‘I was very impressed to hear Tomo Keller’
Yehudi Menuhin
One of the most admired violinists of his generation, Tomo Keller performs as soloist, chamber and orchestral musician, leading ground-breaking performances and recording projects.
2024 marks the release on the Ondine label, of a recording featuring works by Kurt Atterberg. Tomo is the soloist in the Suite for Violin and Viola as well as the director of the Swedish Radio Symphony 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 will be heard again at the 2024 New Year’s Concert in Wuppertal.
In 2020 a DVD/CD box-set with all the Beethoven Piano Concertos was released by Deutsche Grammophon to great critical acclaim, featuring pianist Jan Lisiecki and Tomo Keller directing the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. They will tour Germany once more in 2025 and also perform Beethoven’s Triple Concerto.
Tomo Keller has performed at major concert halls all around the world and has been invited both as 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 led him all across Europe, as well as Russia, Asia, America and the Middle East.
As a chamber musician he has appeared alongside Joshua Bell, Benjamin Grosvenor, HK Gruber, Håkan Hardenberger, Janine Jansen, Denis Kozhukhin, 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 (Assistant Leader 2009-2015) and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Concert Master 2014-2019) and has also appeared with more than 20 orchestras as guest leader all over Europe, the US and Asia. In 2016 Tomo was appointed Director and Leader of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.
Tomo’s recordings include solo works by Bach, Bartok and Ysaÿe, 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.
Tomo Keller was born in Stuttgart in 1974, to German-Japanese musicians, and started playing the violin at the age of six. At the age of ten 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 and numerous other schools in the US and the Far East.
In 2022 he was appointed Professor of violin at the HEMU Sion in Switzerland.
Tomo plays the ‘ex-Braga’ Stradivari of 1726, kindly loaned through the Beare’s International Violin Society.