“In everything he played, Bowes revealed an exacting and deeply felt musicianship.” Los Angeles Times

“The playing was superb: brilliant, authoritative, free, passionate, totally committed, and powerfully projected. Bowes’ tone is intense, variable and pure; his identification with every style was complete…” Strings Magazine USA

One of the UK’s leading violinists, Thomas Bowes (b.1960) has had a career taking him to every part of the music business. He brings to all he undertakes a zest and energy that belie his years, and his music-making gives voice to long experience and deep conviction.

At the age of seventeen he had the great good fortune to be accepted as a student of the legendary Hungarian pedagogue Bela Katona at Trinity College of Music in London. Very much a product of local education in his native Hertfordshire up to that point, his violin studies had had to compete with promising starts as a cricketer (fast bowler) and as a sprinter (200 and 400 metres). After seven years under the exacting tutelage of Professor Katona, he left TCM in 1985 and had by the age of 30 given a notable London recital debut; been a section violinist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (vintage years under the batons of maestri Tennstedt, Solti, Haitink, Svetlanov, Rattle); been a member of the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields; led the Maggini String Quartet as its founding first violinist, and had been elected concertmaster of London’s oldest established chamber orchestra, The London Mozart Players. He made a BBC Proms debut with the LMP and its then artistic director Jane Glover in 1991, and directed and appeared as soloist in many of the LMP’s concerts and tours.

He left both the Maggini Quartet and the LMP in 1992 with a deliberate and self-imposed plan to deepen and broaden the range of his playing. Meanwhile, he continued to be in great demand as a guest concertmaster for many top orchestras in the UK - notably the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the London Symphony and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras – as well as abroad with orchestras in France (Toulouse) and later in Australia (Sydney). He toured the USA as guest leader of the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble and with the Moscow Chamber Orchestra as soloist, playing Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

He also started to be part of that hidden world - London’s ‘session’ scene - and by 2009 had become a favourite concertmaster and violin soloist for many leading film composers. He continues to be in great demand in this genre and enjoys working closely with film composers. He has to date some 260 film credits to his name. Notable recent contributions being to scores by Alexandre Desplat for films by Guillermo del Toro (Pinocchio) and Ellen Kuras (Lee, starring Kate Winslet), by Alberto Iglesias for Pedro Almodóvar (The Room Next Door, starring Juliane Moore and Tilda Swinton), and for Gabriel Yared’s score to Sophia Loren’s last movie (The Life Ahead).

Tom has given highly-praised performances of concertos by Elgar, Walton, Britten and Szymanowski, with all of which pieces he has developed particularly deep relationships. Conductors included have been the late Vernon Handley CBE and Richard Hickox CBE, Joseph Swensen, Sian Edwards, Paul Daniel CBE and Sir Mark Elder CH CBE.

From 2011 he has made several recordings. Writing of his Walton and Barber concerto album, Hugh Canning wrote in the London Sunday Times that, “…Bowes yields to none of the Walton’s great interpreters – Heifetz (the dedicatee), Menuhin, Francescatti, Chung, Kennedy – in his dazzling passage work and he brings a deliciously laid-back italianita…with his gorgeous portamento and rubato.”

In 2013 Tom embarked on a major Bach project and created his two-month ‘Bach Pilgrimage’ across the UK playing 50 concerts of ‘Sei Solo’, the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. Raising thousands of pounds for local charities and mostly dedicated to fund-raising for precious but needy ancient buildings, the Pilgrimage culminated in a recording at London’s Abbey Road of ‘Sei Solo’. Of this recording, released in 2018 on the Navona label, Laurence Vittes in Gramophone Magazine wrote that it was, ‘deeply human…unusually communicative…a succession of miracles.’ His ‘Bach Pilgrimage’ remains a regular feature of his concert-giving, taking him to the heart of local communities across the UK. Further Pilgrimages were undertaken in 2015, 2018 and 2021 whilst in 2019 Tom received a ‘Sebastian Award’ from the Ars Ante Portas Civic Association of Bratislava, Slovakia, for his ‘Extraordinary contribution in maintaining public appreciation of the work of JS Bach’.

The Navona label also released Tom’s recording of the complete Ysaÿe solo Sonatas in 2020. Critics noted a depth of interpretation and characterisation, and the recording was nominated for the solo instrumental category of the International Classical Music Awards. A further recording of the complete Telemann Fantasias for solo violin was released on the Navona label in October 2021 - and has already achieved over 400,000 plays on digital platforms.

With a star-studded orchestra of London’s finest session musicians and much-loved colleagues, Tom has recently recorded the Elgar concerto at Abbey Rd – a place rich in Elgarian atmosphere. It is scheduled for release in 2026. Also scheduled for release is an album of the hair-raising 24 Caprices of Paganini to go with a Tom’s touring show ‘Mystery, Myth and Magic’, a narrated study of the life of that prototype super-star virtuoso Niccoló Paganini.

Tom has been an eloquent and constant advocate of the music of his wife, the composer Eleanor Alberga OBE, premiering and recording her two violin concertos - both written for him - as well as recording her three string quartets and other chamber music with Ensemble Arcadiana, a group formed from the festival Arcadia founded in 2010 by Bowes and Alberga as a way of integrating classical music into the rural community where they live on the Shropshire-Herefordshire border. Tom is at present developing a species-rich wildflower meadow on land adjacent to their house.

Between 2004 and 2014 Tom was the founding artistic director of the Langvad Chamber Music Jamboree at Kirsten Kjaers Museum, Northwest Jutland, Denmark. This summer event was conceived and nurtured as an opportunity for those beginning their journey into professional musical life to play chamber music as equals alongside those with more experience in a convivial and collegiate atmosphere.

Tom and Eleanor formed the violin and piano duo ‘Double Exposure’ in 1995, playing a large range of repertoire in many tours across the USA and featuring much new music along with classics. As well as a ground-breaking tour of China in 1997 (they returned in 2019), the duo gave concerts in Europe and a New York recital debut at Weill Hall Carnegie in 2000 - a concert enthusiastically reviewed by distinguished writer Paul Griffiths in the New York Times:

“Mr. Bowes was passionate and fiery on his own terms, which were thoroughly musical. He has an excellent range of color, from bleached
tones to a full earthiness, and he throws off double stops and harmonics
 with aplomb. So, though, do all virtuosos. Things that more distinguish 
Mr Bowes are his rhythmic suppleness and his command of subtle microtonal tuning as a way of pointing accents or inflecting the line... Bartók’s music also brought out his sense of rhythm, his way of bending back 
from the regular beat, with all the pent-up energy of a sapling bending in the wind.”

Tom is privileged to play and own a violin by one of the great Cremonese master makers – a ‘grand pattern’ Nicolo Amati of 1659.

Biography © Tom Bowes 2024