Two new concertmasters for London Symphony Orchestra

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The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) has announced that violinists Benjamin Marquise Gilmore and Andrej Power are to be its new concertmasters. The musicians will take up their new roles in August 2023, joining current concertmaster Roman Simovic.

Gilmore, 35, has been concertmaster of the Philharmonia Orchestra since 2019, and a member of the Navarra Quartet since 2021. He won a scholarship at the age of ten to study with Natalia Boyarskaya at the Yehudi Menuhin School, and in 2005 went to study at the Vienna Conservatoire with Pavel Vernikov and Julian Rachlin, graduating in 2010. In 2013 he won the first prize at the Oskar Back Violin Competition in Amsterdam, having previously received the third prize at the Mirecourt International Competition, second at the Brahms Competition in Pörtschach, and second at the Yampolsky Competition in Moscow. In 2011 he became a member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and he has been a fellow of Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute since 2015. From 2016 to 2019 he was leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and frequently returns there as guest leader and director. He has also been guest concertmaster with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in London. He plays a violin made by Turin maker Annibale Fagnola in 1921, a copy of a Guadagnini.

Power, also 35, has been principal concertmaster with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra since 2014, when he became the youngest player to be given that position in the orchestra’s history. He studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm with Henryk Kowalski and at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland with Zakhar Bron. He is frequently invited to guest-lead orchestras and regularly performs in different chamber music groups, along with his own quartet. He plays a violin made by Matteo Gofriller in 1695.

Highlights of the LSO’s 2023–24 season include Patricia Kopatchinskaja performing in Fazil Say’s Violin Concerto (1001 Nights in Harem) on 8 October; Isabelle Faust in Bartók’s Violin Concerto no.1 on 23 November and in the Brahms Violin Concerto on 1 March 2024; and Janine Jansen playing Sally Beamish’s Distans: Concerto for Violin and Clarinet, with clarinettist Martin Fröst and conductor Gianandrera Noseda. Cellist Abel Selaocoe will perform the London premiere of his own Cello Concerto and a further short work on 16 November. Thomas Adès will conduct the UK premiere of his Violin Concerto: Air with Anne-Sophie Mutter, who also performs Witold Lutosławski’s Partita, along with two Stravinsky ballets, Agon and Orpheus.