Tasmin Little

English violinist Tasmin Little has pursued an unusually wide span of activities over the course of a prolific career, taking on concerto engagements, solo recitals, chamber collaborations, scholarly projects, and television production with equal commitment; her boundary-crossing curiosity has made her a familiar public figure in England.

She came into the world in London in 1965, trained at the Yehudi Menuhin School (where Nigel Kennedy was a fellow student) and the Guildhall School of Music (where she received a gold medal), and later worked privately in Toronto with Lorand Fenyves. Two landmark first appearances took place in 1988: a Purcell Room recital in London with pianist Piers Lane, who has continued as a regular chamber-music partner, and her orchestral solo debut with the Hallé Orchestra. Throughout the 1990s she consolidated an international profile through frequent partnerships with conductors such as Kurt Masur, Simon Rattle, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Andrew Davis, while also devising recitals that invited direct audience conversation about the works being performed.

Her recording activity expanded rapidly during the same decade, yielding distinguished releases on EMI, Chandos, Decca, Virgin, and Hyperion. The breadth of her interests is evident in a discography that encompasses concertos by Brahms, Bruch, Delius, Dvorák, Lalo, Sibelius, and Walton, together with chamber pieces by Debussy, Poulenc, and Ravel and numerous shorter works. She developed a special affinity for Frederick Delius, the subject of her BBC2 documentary The Works; her account of the composer’s sonatas earned a Diapason d’Or, and the Delius Society issued her research paper on the Violin Concerto. A further documentary in 2008 chronicled the creation of “The Naked Violin,” a solo program made available as a free internet download. Her 2010 Chandos recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto received “Critics Choice” recognition at the 2011 Classics BRIT Awards.

In 2012 she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Subsequent Chandos projects included a 2016 triple-CD survey of Beethoven’s violin-and-piano sonatas with Martin Roscoe, as well as repertoire ranging from Strauss and Respighi to Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. British music remained central to her identity, allowing her to benefit from renewed interest in tonal repertoire from that tradition. In 2015 she coupled the Delius Suite for violin and orchestra with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto in G minor, Op. 80, and a concerto by light-music composer Haydn Wood; the following year she participated in the crossover album A Violin for All Seasons.

She has served on the faculty of her alma mater, the Guildhall School of Music, and in 2016 was awarded honorary membership in the Royal Academy of Music. Recording momentum continued into the late 2010s, bringing her discography past fifty titles by 2020. Recent Chandos releases featured an album devoted to Clara Schumann, Dame Ethel Smyth, and Amy Beach in 2019, followed in 2020 by the Phantasy Concerto for violin and orchestra, Op. 63, of Eugene Goossens, recorded with Sir Andrew Davis and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. That same year she disclosed plans to explore a fresh artistic path, although the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed concert seasons before the new direction could be clarified.