Laura van der Heijden

Ever since claiming the BBC Young Musician of the Year title at fifteen, cellist Laura van der Heijden has drawn notice as an emerging talent. While still enrolled at Cambridge University she issued her first album in 2017.

Born April 7, 1997, in West Sussex, van der Heijden began recorder studies at four, added piano lessons the next year, and started the cello at six. Displaying immediate promise on both keyboard and strings, she joined the junior department of London’s Royal College of Music in 2005. In 2008 she became a student of cellist Leonid Gorokhov; the following year she performed with the Jupiter Chamber Orchestra in Forest Hill, East Sussex, the town she would later make her home. Early in the 2010s she captured several prominent youth awards, among them first prize with distinction at the Swiss National Youth Music Competition in 2010, an achievement that led to a 2011 appearance performing a Boccherini cello concerto with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. Another landmark came in 2012 when she was named BBC Young Musician of the Year; in the final she presented William Walton’s Cello Concerto with conductor Kirill Karabits.

Van der Heijden was appointed ambassador for the Children & the Arts organization in 2013. She entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, balancing academics with performances until her 2019 graduation. Her recording career opened while she was still a student with the 2017 release 1948: Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Shaporin, Lyadov, an adventurous survey of Russian works composed in the year of Stalin’s harsh cultural clampdown. As soloist she has appeared with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and multiple BBC ensembles including the BBC Philharmonic. Concert platforms have included Wigmore Hall in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Opernhaus Zürich, while her chamber-music collaborators encompass pianists Tom Poster, Katya Apekisheva, and Jâms Coleman. In 2022 she and Coleman issued the Chandos album Pohádka: Tales from Prague to Budapest.