Tuesday, July 16th 2024

Lawrence Power (viola)

Internationally acclaimed violist Lawrence Power is widely recognised for his rich sound, technical mastery and passionate commitment to new music. Lawrence has advanced the cause of the viola both through the excellence of his performances, whether in recital, chamber music or concerto, and through the creation of the Viola Commissioning Circle (VCC), which has spawned a significant body of new repertoire for the instrument by today's finest composers. In the 2023/24 season, Lawrence will premiere Magnus Lindberg's Viola Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, commissioned through the VCC. He will return to the Hallé, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Frankfurt hr-Sinfonieorchester after making his debut with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. In the last two seasons, Lawrence has premiered Anders Hillborg's Viola Concerto with the Swedish Radio Orchestra, Sinfonieorchester Basel and the Dresden Philharmonic, and Cassandra Miller's Viola Concerto with the Brussels Philharmonic and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which critic Alex Ross has described as "a major new work". Lawrence enjoys conducting violin and viola orchestras, as he did recently at the Edinburgh International Festival with the Scottish Ensemble, at the Australian National Academy of Music and with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, and he conducts his own orchestra, Collegium, made up of excellent young musicians from all over Europe. He is on the teaching staff of Zurich's Hochschule der Kunst and gives masterclasses all over the world, including at the Verbier Festival. Thanks to his intelligent approach to programming, Lawrence is often invited to work with venues and festivals as a curator. He is the founder and artistic director of the West Wycombe Chamber Music Festival, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2021. As a chamber musician he is much in demand and regularly performs at the Verbier, Salzburg, Aspen, Oslo and other festivals with artists such as Steven Isserlis, Nicholas Alstaedt, Simon Crawford-Phillips, Vilde Frang, Maxim Vengerov and Joshua Bell.