String players triumph at 2025 RPS Awards

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Cellist Laura van der Heijden has won the Instrumentalist Award at the 2025 Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) Awards, the annual awards ceremony celebrating the best of live classical music-making in the UK, which was held in Birmingham on 6 March.

Double bassist, conductor and presenter Leon Bosch received the Storytelling Award for his BBC Radio 3 programme Classical Africa, which tells the often overlooked history of music and ideas from the continent.

Both artists played live at the ceremony, which was held in the West Midlands for the first time in the event’s 36-year history. Van der Heijden performed Florence Price’s Night, with pianist Joachim Lim, a student at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and Bosch played Grant McLachlan’s Abdi, with pianist María Linares Molero, also of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

The award for Large-Scale Composition went to Katherine Balch’s whisper concerto, a work for cello and orchestra that was premiered by Zlatomir Fung and the BBC Philharmonic and inspired by the ‘whisper cadenza’ of György Ligeti’s cello concerto.

RPS Chair Angela Dixon said: ‘The RPS Awards have a story to tell about classical music-making in the UK today that is both inspiring and humbling… We’re here this evening to recognise excellence in classical music in all of its forms and to celebrate the impact our sector is having on people in all walks of life.’ The RPS is a charity that has been celebrating and supporting classical music in the UK since 1813. 

BBC Radio 3 will broadcast a special RPS Awards programme at 7.30pm on Friday 7 March, available for a further month on BBC Sounds, giving audiences the opportunity to hear more music from this year’s winners. A film of the RPS Awards presentation will be freely available to watch for one month on the RPS website from Monday 17 March.

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