RAPHAEL WALLFISCH
Raphael Wallfisch
Violoncello
One of the greatest cellists of our time
Raphael Wallfisch’s commanding interpretation of Elgar’s Cello Concerto
The Strad
Raphael Wallfisch is absolutely splendid, playing very eloquently and persuasively
MusicWeb International
BIOGRAPHY
Raphael Wallfisch is one of the world’s most celebrated cellists performing on the international stage, renowned for his curiosity and commitment to exploring and broadening the full range of repertoire for the instrument, and drawing on a rich musical heritage.
He was born in London into a family of distinguished musicians, his mother the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and his father the pianist Peter Wallfisch, and was inspired at an early age by hearing Zara Nelsova play, going on to study in California with Gregor Piatigorsky, who chose him to perform with Jascha Heifetz in the informal recitals at his home. His career was launched at the age of twenty-four when he won the Gaspar Cassadó International Competition in Florence.
Since then he has enjoyed a global career, much loved in his home country where he has forged close relationships with orchestras including the London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, Hallé, BBC NOW, Royal Scottish National, BBC Scottish and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic; and respected around the world, working throughout Europe with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, WDR Symphony, RAI Torino, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Gulbenkian, Bergen Philharmonic, Gothenburg Symphony, Lahti Symphony and Budapest Festival orchestras, and further afield with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Sydney Symphony, New Zealand Symphony, Singapore Symphony and many others, working recently with such leading conductors as Łukasz Borowicz, Martyn Brabbins, Nicholas Collon, Andrew Davis, Neeme Järvi, Kirill Karabits, Andrew Litton, Ed Spanjaard, Gábor Takács-Nagy, Yan Pascal Tortelier and Bramwell Tovey.
The depth of Wallfisch’s interest in the repertoire is borne out in his extraordinary discography – including a long relationship with Chandos, a complete Vivaldi series on Naxos with Nicholas Kraemer, and with EMI, Decca, Black Box, ASV, CPO and Nimbus – which explores both the mainstream and countless lesser-known works by Barber, Dohnanyi, Hindemith and Respighi, to name a few, and what is considered the benchmark recording of Martinů concertos with the Czech Philharmonic and Jiří Bělohlávek. Wallfisch is a particular champion of British repertoire, recording concertos by Bax, Bliss, Britten, Delius, Finzi, Moeran and Walton, written for Piatigorsky, which he was privileged to record for the Chandos Walton Edition. He enjoyed strong early collaborations and musical friendships with such legendary British conductors as Vernon Handley, Richard Hickox and Charles Mackerras, and he is now President of the British Music Society.
He is dedicated to expanding the cello repertoire, working closely with many of Britain’s leading composers, many of whom have written works especially for him, including Peter Maxwell Davies, Kenneth Leighton, Giles Swayne, John Tavener and James MacMillan, which he recorded with the BBC Scottish Symphony with Osmo Vänskä. He plays regularly at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and is currently focused on a series of recordings of Jewish refugee composers for CPO ‘Voices in the Wilderness’, including Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans and joined by the recording of a new work ‘In Exile’ by Jonathan Dove for cello, baritone and orchestra with Simon Keenlyside, the City of Birmingham Symphony and Gergely Madaras released in 2023 (Lyrita). Other recent highlights include a collaboration with the Royal Ballet and Carlos Acosta at Covent Garden which they then took to the Barbican in multiple performances.
As a soloist and consummate chamber musician, he has toured worldwide, performing at many of the world’s prestigious halls and festivals including the Concertgebouw, Wiener Konzerthaus and Berliner Philharmonie, alongside regular festival appearances including Spoleto, Schleswig Holstein, Enescu and Pablo Casals, Adelaide and Perth festivals as well as the BBC Proms, Aldeburgh and Edinburgh International. His long-standing and distinguished partnership with pianist John York over four decades spanned international tours and numerous recordings of core and undiscovered repertoire including a recent album of cello transcriptions of Rebecca Clarke. More recently he has founded a quartet Amici della Musica and his Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch with Hagai Shaham (violin) and Arnon Erez (piano) has received critical acclaim, invited for the Beethoven 2020 anniversary to perform the complete Beethoven trios at Wigmore Hall, where Wallfisch enjoys a long and fruitful relationship.
The strong influence of Wallfisch’s early teachers including Amaryllis Fleming, Amadeo Baldovino and Derek Simpson has led to his passion in working with new generations of cellists and he is in demand as a teacher, currently as Professor at the Royal College of Music and was recently appointed International Chair of Violoncello and Chamber Music at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, as well as being invited frequently to the juries of international competitions such as the Rostropovich in Paris, Schoenfeld in Harbin and Enescu in Bucharest. He plays the 1733 Montagnana “Ex-Romberg” and an exquisite modern cello built for him by Patrick Robin.
May 2026
Raphael Wallfisch is represented worldwide by LoganArts Management Ltd.
Promoters please note: if you wish to include this biography in a concert programme or similar, please contact the appropriate agent to ensure that you receive the most up to date version.
For more information, please contact :
Andrew Logan, Director
M: +44 (0) 7841 582 851
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More also at www.raphaelwallfisch.com
PRESS QUOTES
The Strad, April 2023 – Raphael Wallfisch: In Exile
Janet Banks
This is the first recording of English composer Jonathan Dove’s Cello Concerto, premiered in September 2021 at the George Enescu Festival in Bucharest. Inspired by the family history of cellist Raphael Wallfisch, Dove took as his subject the universal plight of the refugee, fleeing across the seas to a strange land, creating music that is both moving and direct.
Baritone Simon Keenlyside, as the voice of the refugee, sings texts centred on an anonymous tenth-century English text, The Wayfarer, alternating with writers such as Dante and Kahlil Gibran. Wallfisch’s role is to give voice to the deepest feelings of the exile’s soul, plunging and soaring with powerful eloquence, sometimes commenting after the voice, sometimes moving in duet with it.
The work, a little over half an hour long, is through-composed, and opens with the first of three extended sections for unaccompanied cello, gradually climbing from its lowest notes up to the heights in music of intense yearning. Wallfisch is a passionate advocate for the music, his playing, closely recorded, particularly visceral in the highest reaches.
In the final section, ‘My grief on the sea’, Wallfisch’s opening motif, heavy with emotion, develops into a duet with the voice in beautiful high, sustained double-stops. Night Song, a haunting piece for cello and piano, is derived from this music.
Catalogue number: Lyrita SRCD413
CBSO/Madaras review — a moving new work by Jonathan Dove is born
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Rebecca Franks
Friday December 10 2021, 12.00pm, The Times
★★★★☆
Unknown. Unnamed. Untouchable. About two thirds of the way through In Exile Jonathan Dove sets a list of 19 “un” words. They are words that dehumanise. Words attached to the nameless exile at the heart of this piece. “Unknown” floats up, wistfully. “Unnamed” falls into the depths. “Untouchable” snarls with fury. It’s a powerful sequence in a moving new piece from the British composer, commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as part of its centenary celebrations, and surely bound to have a life beyond its UK premiere.
In Exile has many strengths. Coherence is chief among them. The piece sits somewhere between a song cycle, an operatic scena and a cello concerto. One person is represented by two soloists: baritone and cello. Add to that a text drawn from eight sources — ranging from the Iranian-American writer Kaveh Bassiri’s 99 Names of Exile to an Old English text, The Wayfarer — and this substantial, 30-minute piece could be a muddle. Yet the librettist Alasdair Middleton and Dove make it work: the narrative arc, pacing and point of view all convince.
If the language is more dissonant than Dove’s fans might expect, we’re not talking Birtwistle here. It’s simply part of the piece’s unsettled mood, the undercurrent of anguish. And there’s another virtue: Dove’s storytelling instinct. He guides us through a day in an exile’s life, exploring emotions as part of character. The two soloists — a brooding Simon Keenlyside and an eloquent Raphael Wallfisch — reveal different aspects of the narrator: outer and inner voices; thoughts and feelings; intellect and instinct.
The vocal line is plain, the cello’s more elaborate, while the orchestration is a masterclass in economy. Abstract writing mixes with flashes of pictorialism. The sea is an important presence, captured in undulating strings and a certain bleakness shared with Barber’s Dover Beach. The piece builds in intensity until, over a bass drum beat and brooding lower strings, we reach a profound elegy. “What country, friends, is this?” the narrator asks. Lamenting cellos answer.
This is a story that can speak to any time or place. That was a smart move. For Wallfisch, the hinterland includes the legacy of his mother, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, whose cello playing saved her life in Auschwitz and who is the dedicatee of this piece. That’s impossible to forget when listening, yet there’s also space for the audience to bring their own experiences to the music. Gergely Madaras did a wonderful job conducting. And in the performances of Sibelius’s Finlandia and Dvorak’s New World Symphony, he turned the orchestra into an entire world.
Available on BBC Sounds
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