Michael Foyle

Violinist Michael Foyle is also an educator who became the youngest person ever appointed as a professor at London's Royal Academy of Music. He is a rising performer with concerto and chamber music engagements in Britain and abroad on his list of credits. Foyle was born in 1991 in Troon, Ayrshire, Scotland. He took up music at age six, at first playing the piano before switching to violin and making rapid progress. He held leadership positions with the National Children's Orchestra of Scotland and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year Tabor Award. Foyle studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna; his primary teachers were Maureen Smith, Daniel Rowland, and Pavel Vernikov. A major breakthrough was a win at the Netherlands Violin Competition in 2016, playing the Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 35, of Karol Szymanowski with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. That led to the opportunity to give his debut recital at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and later that year, he made his debut at London's Wigmore Hall. Foyle has gone on to appear at many of Britain's top venues, including Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, and St. Martin in the Fields, not to mention Buckingham Palace. He has been heard regularly on the BBC 3 radio network. Foyle's concerto credits include appearances with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, and the Polish Baltic Philharmonic. He has been visible at festivals internationally, with recitals at the St. Magnus International Festival in Scotland, the New York Chamber Music Festival, and the Cervantino Festival in Mexico, among others. Foyle performs chamber music with the Trio Balthasar and, with pianist Maksim Štšura, as the Foyle-Štšura Duo. That duo has released the albums The Great War Centenary (2018), a complete cycle of the violin-and-piano works of Krzysztof Penderecki (2019), and the first volume in a planned cycle of Beethoven's violin sonatas (2021). In addition to his professorship at the Royal Academy of Music, he has been on the faculty of the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne, Germany, since 2021.
© James Manheim /TiVo