John Holloway

Baroque violinist John Holloway first drew notice through his leadership roles with early music groups that helped shape period-instrument performance in Britain, while he has also sustained a parallel career on modern violin and established himself as a prominent teacher.

Born in Neath, Wales, on July 19, 1948, Holloway gave his debut public recital at age eight. The next year he began private lessons with violinist Yfrah Neaman, later continuing those studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where he additionally studied chamber music with William Pleeth and served as concertmaster of the Guildhall Orchestra. After securing prizes in several international competitions, he traveled through the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand with the Menuhin Festival Orchestra, earned a post as second violinist in the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, and formed the Silvestri String Quartet.

His engagement with historical performance began when he first heard Baroque violinist Sigiswald Kuijken in 1972. During the later 1970s he deepened that involvement as concertmaster of the Kent Opera Orchestra under Roger Norrington and in the same capacity with Norrington’s London Classical Players. In 1975 he established his own period-instrument ensemble, L’École d’Orphée, and appeared on a 1988 Harmonia Mundi recording of Bach’s Musical Offering, BWV 1079.

Between 1977 and 1991 Holloway held the concertmaster chair of the Taverner Consort and Players while maintaining an active teaching schedule at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Schola Cantorum in Basel, and the Early Music Institute of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. In 1999 he joined the faculty of the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber in Dresden. From 2003 to 2005 he served as music director of the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra, and in 2005 he co-founded the historical performance ensemble Mannheimer Hofkapelle. He directed the Violine in Dresden competition and master class from 2006 to 2012 and has remained resident in the city. After retiring from his Dresden post in 2014, he has continued to record for ECM, the label that has released many of his more than one hundred discs; in 2023 he issued the album Henry Purcell: Fantazias with his own John Holloway Ensemble, a project captured in 2015.