Timothy Ridout is one of the most sought-after violists of his generation. He was a BBC New Generation Artist, the winner of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship 2020 and the recipient of the 2023 Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award. He performs regularly at renowned concert halls worldwide and receives invitations to appear at the festivals of Verbier, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Rosendal and Salzburg.
Highlights of 2024/25 have included the world premiere of Mark Simpson’s viola concerto Hold Your Heart in Your Teeth with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and performances with the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife, the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the Bern Symphony Orchestra and Ensemble Resonanz. He has performed at the Sommets Musicaux in Gstaad and the Ryedale Festival and this summer returns to the Salzburg Festival.
Timothy Ridout has collaborated with orchestras such as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Camerata Salzburg, the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, the Hallé Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra, and with conductors including Lionel Bringuier, Sylvain Cambreling, Nicholas Collon, Riccardo Minasi, Sakari Oramo, Simon Rattle, András Schiff, Robin Ticciati, Kazuki Yamada and David Zinman.
As a chamber musician, he has performed with partners such as Federico Colli, Isabelle Faust, Pablo Ferrández, Benjamin Grosvenor, Janine Jansen, Denis Kozhukhin and Kian Soltani. He has also performed as one of the seven Junge Wilde (Young Wild Ones) at the Konzerthaus Dortmund.
He records for harmonia mundi. His discography includes A Poet’s Love (2021), Tertis’s arrangement of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, for which he received a Gramophone Award in 2023, and A Lionel Tertis Celebration (2024). In February 2025 he released his first solo album.
Timothy Ridout was born in London and studied at the Royal Academy of Music and at the Kronberg Academy with Nobuko Imai. In 2020 he won the first Sir Jeffrey Tate Prize from the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, and in 2021 he was accepted into the Bowers Program of the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Center.
He plays a viola made by Peregrino di Zanetto (c.1565—75), on loan from a generous benefactor of the Beare’s International Violin Society.
