Nicola Benedetti

Nicola Benedetti is a Scottish violinist celebrated for her technically assured, warmly communicative playing across the core Romantic and 20th-century concerto repertoire. Winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, she has since built an international solo career while also founding an organization dedicated to music education. Listeners can expect polished, deeply felt performances of familiar concertos alongside new commissions.

In Cincinnati she plays Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1, a Romantic staple built on a long, singing melody that returns after a stormy opening. In San Francisco she takes on Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2, a leaner, more acidic work where a folk-like tune keeps getting bent out of shape by the orchestra underneath it. With the LA Philharmonic she performs Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, prized for a soloist entrance that arrives almost immediately, skipping the usual long orchestral introduction. Across these programs, expect a big, warm sound projected with real evenness from the instrument's lowest string to its highest, phrasing that favors clarity of line over showy rubato, and a soloist who listens closely to the orchestra rather than simply riding on top of it.

Nicola Benedetti was born in 1987 in West Kilbride, Scotland, to an Italian-Scottish family, and began violin lessons as a young child alongside her sister. She studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School in England, a specialist music school, and later continued her training with Maciej Rakowski and Natasha Boyarsky. She came to wide public attention in 2004 after winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. Since then she has performed with major orchestras in the UK, Europe, and the United States, built a discography spanning Baroque, Romantic, and contemporary repertoire, and worked with living composers on new violin concertos. She has also been a vocal advocate for music education, founding the Benedetti Foundation, which runs workshops for young string players and teachers across the UK. She plays a violin made by Antonio Stradivari, on loan for her career.