Born in Ripon, North Yorkshire, Toby enjoys a busy and varied career as both soloist, chamber and orchestral musician. Toby completed his studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the class of Louise Hopkins, graduating in 2019 from the Artist Diploma program. 

In 2019 Toby was selected for the Tillett Young Artists Platform and made his Wigmore hall debut in October of that year. He continues to perform regularly as a soloist and recitalist with duo partner, pianist Ryan Drucker throughout the UK, playing for concert societies and festivals around the country. As a soloist Toby has appeared throughout the UK with multiple orchestras including the St Cecilia and European Union Chamber orchestras, performing concertos ranging from Haydn to Shostakovich. 

As well as being a sought after soloist Toby is a passionate chamber musician and was a member of the award winning Jubilee String Quartet from 2017-2023. With the quartet he has performed in many leading concert halls in the UK and Europe, made recordings for the Rubicon Classics label and appeared several times on BBC Radio 3.

Toby also enjoys a busy orchestral schedule and has recently been appointed as Sub-principal cello of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, regularly plays principal cello for the Fantasia Orchestra and makes regular guest principal appearances with other orchestras including EUCO.

Aside from performing Toby has a passion for teaching having delivered many masterclasses and workshops both individually and alongside the Jubilee quartet. In September 2022 Toby joined the music faculty at the prestigious Uppingham School and as of 2023 also took up the cello teaching position at Oakham School.  

Toby plays on a modern cello made by Paul Collins c.2013.

Emma Denton studied at the Royal Academy of Music where she received many of the top awards including the Louise Child Prize for the highest overall degree, the David Martin/Florence Hooten Concerto prize and the Max Pirani and Harry Isaacs chamber music prizes. She was the winner of the Muriel Taylor Scholarship and was selected to perform alongside Rostropovitch at the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Emma has performed concerti with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Nagoya Philharmonic, Britten Sinfonia, London Soloists and recently recorded ‘The Sacred Veil’ for Decca with VOCES8 and the Grammy-winning composer Eric Whitacre. Emma has performed for more than 20 years as the cellist of the acclaimed Carducci Quartet. They have appeared at major concert halls around the world and their Naxos recordings of Philip Glass Quartets have had over fifteen million plays on Spotify. Emma plays on a Ruggieri cello c. 1685. 

Jane Salmon is Principal Cello of the Oxford Philharmonic. Especially well known as a chamber musician, her work has taken her to more than 45 countries. She has appeared in more than 60 CD recordings, numerous broadcasts, first performances, festivals, and concerts in many major venues.  Jane was cellist of the Schubert Ensemble, winner of the Royal Philharmonic prize for chamber music and a leading exponent of music for piano and strings for 35 years. 2018 saw the group’s celebratory final season with over 50 performances, many of which are now available on the Schubert Ensemble’s YouTube channel. A founder member of Endymion, which has performed several times at the BBC Proms, Jane has played guest principal with the Scottish and English Chamber Orchestras and London Sinfonietta, and played with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and Chamber Orchestra of Europe. She is a tutor in cello and chamber music at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and regularly returns to teach on a course in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

*The participation of Jane Salmon is supported by Anita Higham OBE.

Martin Thomas is Principal Cello of Oxford Philharmonic. He studied at the Royal Academy in London where he became a founding member of the Coull Quartet. After 11 years playing with the quartet he left to pursue a freelance career performing with orchestras in London. Martin now enjoys a busy life playing with orchestras, teaching and performing chamber music. He is currently a member of the Archaus Quartet.

As an international soloist and chamber musician, Mats Lidström has gained a reputation for performances of great insight and virtuosity. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, currently living in London, Mats combines performing with teaching and composing.

Mats studied with Ms. Maja Vogl at the Gothenburg Conservatoire for six years before continuing with Leonard Rose and Channing Robbins for four years at the Juilliard School of Performing Arts. Chamber music coaching with Claus Adam, (founder-member of the Juilliard String Quartet and a student of Emmanuel Feuermann), Alexander Schneider (violinist with the legendary Budapest String Quartet), Misha Schneider (student of Julius Klengel), Joseph Fuchs and William Lincer (principal violist of the NBC Orchestra with Toscanini and Bernstein). Additional cello coaching with Pierre Fournier, Janos Starker, Zara Nelsova and Lynn Harrell. Also coaching in renaissance music with Suzanne Bloch, daughter of composer Ernest Bloch.

Mats plays the ‘Grützmacher Rocca’ (Joseph Antonius Rocca, 1857), the cello used for the premiere in Cologne March 1898 of Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote.

Appointed professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1993 (Honorary Associate in 1998, Leo Stern Professor of Cello 2019). Guest-professor 2023–2028 at the Malmö Music Academy, Sweden, Mats Lidström has given masterclasses at conservatories in San Francisco, Cleveland and Oberlin, as well as in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria, Denmark, the UK and Sweden. Prior to the Royal Academy, he taught at the Gothenburg University, Sweden.

Mats is the founder of the annual summer course EXPANSION for cellists, which aims to move away from the standard ‘masterclass’ and provide the students with the technical fundament needed for expressing musical ideas. Hence its motto: ‘Imagination promises musical expression, but a solid technique delivers it’. 

As a soloist he has performed and recorded with some of the world’s leading orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Scottish SO, the Deutsche S.O.Berlin, Czech Philharmonic, the Stockholm Philharmonic, Göteborg (Gothenburg) Symphony Orchestra and the Dallas Symphony, with conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Marios Papadopoulos, André Previn, Andrew Litton, Leif Segerstam and Maxim Shostakovich.

As a soloist or chamber musician, Mats has performed in many of the major halls, including Alice Tully Hall and The Y (New York City), Théâtre du Châtelet and Cité de la Musique (Paris), Musikverein (Vienna), Gulbenkian (Lisbon), Palais des Beaux Arts (‘Bozar’, Brussels), The Royal Palace and the Berwald Hall of Stockholm, the University Hall in Oslo, The Sheldonian and Holywell of Oxford, Buckingham Palace and St. James’s Palace, Kensington Palace, the Purcell Room, The Barbican, Cadogan, Wigmore, Queen Elizabeth and Royal Festival Halls, St. Paul’s and Southwark cathedrals of London.

Mats’ research of the neglected but beautiful repertoire for his instrument, has resulted in several highly acclaimed and award-winning CD’s (including ‘Record of the Month’ and Record of the Week by the BBC Music Magazine, The Guardian, the French Diapason d’Or). He appears as soloist and chamber musician on the Hyperion label, EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, BIS, Musica Sveciae, Opus 3, Caprice Records, as well as on his own label CelloLid (the Brahms sonatas and his Suite Tintin for cello and piano). Mats’ debut album with his son Leif (Swans, 24 swans from all over the world) is released in August this year on Hyperion.

Several appearances on TV and radio throughout Europe, Japan, S America and the U.S (including guest- appearances on Andy Warhol’s TV show Interiors), several times a guest on Radio 3’s In Tune, including earlier this week to promote tonight’s performance.

Festivals include Aspen, Kingston, Pensacola (USA), Cello Encounter (Rio de Janeiro) and festivals in Holland, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. 

Mats has worked as Principal Cellist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Swedish Opera and Norrköping S O (Sweden). In addition he has worked as guest-principal with the London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia, Britten Sinfonia and St. Martin-in-the-Fields of London, The Scottish BBC and Royal Scottish National Orchestras, Bournemouth SO, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Los Angeles and Oslo Philharmonic orchestras, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonie and the major symphony orchestras of Sweden. Mats is currently solo cellist with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra Soloists, a position shared with cellist Peter Adams.

Mats coaches the youth orchestras The Odyssey Festival Orchestra and London Schools Symphony Orchestra, appearing with the latter as soloist at London’s The Barbican in Shostakovich’ 1st concerto and Strauss’s Don Quixote.

Mats’s compilation of orchestral excerpts for Boosey & Hawkes, The Orchestral Cellist, prompted the founding of his own publishing company CelloLid (distributed worldwide by Stainer & Bell and via the internet by nkoda.com). Besides his own compositions and transcriptions, it offers the series if Bach were a cellist which lives the fantasy that everything Bach wrote was intended for the cello. Its aim is to make cellists focus on works by Bach other than the solo suites and the gamba sonatas. Also published by CelloLid.com is his The Essential Warm-up Routine for Cellists, how to warm-up all facets of cello-playing on a daily basis. His 180 page scale book The Beauty of Scales was made possible through a research grant from the Royal Academy of Music. A third book is called Heritage, formed by a compilation of etudes by past cello masters.

Compositions include Rigoletto Fantasy for cello and orchestra on Verdi’s opera, Puccini Fantasy for cello and orchestra, the RFK Concerto for cello and orchestra to the memory of Robert F. Kennedy, Maze of Love for voice, piano and orchestra, Marche Triomphale for two pianos and percussion (gso.com 2012 Commission), Carnival in Venice for violin and two cellos (EMI), My Heart Is In The East, Raoul Wallenberg In Memoriam for solo cello (performed at the Swedish Parliament and to members of the US Congress as part of the centenary celebrations as well as a ballet performed at the Cadogan Hall), Aphrodite’s Rock, a Mediterranean souvenir for solo cello, A philosopher in waiting for solo recorder celebrating Descartes’s visit to Stockholm in 1650, The Sea Of Flowers Is Rising Higher, elegy for solo cello in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales (Hyperion), Christmas Cookies for mezzo-soprano and 3 cellos, Suite for solo cello.


For cello and piano: Suite Tintin – 9 scenes from The Adventures of Tintin (cellolid.com), four sets of pieces for young players (Spooky Pieces, Traffic, Ballroom Dances and Hotel Suite), Concert Suite (extract from his melodrama The Stamp King, premiered at the Wigmore Hall, London Dec.2010, narrated by Sir Terry Waite), Through Windows of Of Thine Age, a Swedish rhapsody ( to the memory of Prime Minister Olof Palme, premiered at the Wigmore Hall Dec.2011), four Love Songs, The Dying Dandy, commemorating the centenary of Les Ballets Suèdois, and Le Cygne, in honour of Camille Saint-Saëns.

Of the many transcriptions for cello as well as other instrumental combinations, composers include Bach, Rameau, Puccini, Ravel, Scriabine and Cole Porter, of which several have been recorded on CD. For his Suite de Pulcinella (cello and piano version of the 1949 orchestral score), Lidstrom has obtained a performance license from the Stravinsky Estate.

During the 2004-05 season, Mats Lidstrom was the Artistic Director of From Sweden, 35 concerts performed in the major venues in London, and the greatest undertaking for Swedish classical music abroad by the Swedish Government. Mats comes from a family with more than a hundred years of involvement within the arts as opera soloists, instrumentalists in principal positions, prima ballerinas, conductors, jazz musicians and visual artists. His ancestor, Rickard Dybeck, wrote the Swedish national anthem.

*The participation of Mats Lidström is supported by The Michael Bishop Foundation. 

Peter Adams’ career can be truly described as meteoric.  When most musicians are still at school, the sixteen year old Peter was playing in the orchestra of London Festival Ballet.  By the time he was 21 he had become principal cellist of both the London String Orchestra and the London City Ballet.  Perhaps even more remarkably he became in the same year Professor of viola da gamba and baroque cello at the Royal Academy of Music – the youngest ever professor in the Academy’s history.

Not content with these achievements, four years later Peter embarked upon a two year period of further study in America at Indiana University, taking lessons and masterclasses with such legendary figures as Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, Janos Starker, Franco Gulli, Rostislav Dubinsky and Paul Tortelier, before returning from America to study further with William Pleeth.

Peter’s orchestral career has earned him principal positions with the English String Orchestra, Brighton Philharmonic and the Oxford Philharmonic which he joined in 2007 along with many guest appearances. Peter has had throughout his life a love of chamber music. He was a founder member of the Rogeri Trio and for twelve years the ‘cellist of the Bochmann Quartet. Chamber music collaborators over recent years have included Maxim Vengerov, Lang Lang, Nigel Kennedy, Robert Cohen, Jeremy Menuhin, Rafael Walfisch and Natalie Klein amongst many others.

Since the start of 2017 Peter has had a busy schedule touring worldwide with Nigel Kennedy’s Quintet appearing at such halls as Berlin Philharmonie, Vienna Konzerthause, Sydney Opera House, The Royal Festival Hall and Royal Albert Hall, to name only a few.

This last twelve months have seen concerto appearances with the concerti of Elgar, Schumann, Brahms Double, Beethoven Triple and Bloch Schelomo.
Peter has a large list of recordings to his name as soloist but also in chamber and orchestral situations and many broadcasts on the BBC and Classic FM.
Throughout his career he has maintained his interest in early music through his teaching and solo appearances on viola da gamba and his directorship of the Elizabethan Consort of Viols.

Peter plays a cello by G.B.Rogeri dated 1697.

*The participation of Peter Adams is supported by Dr Saphié Ashtiany & Prof. Paul Davies.