Colin Carr appears throughout the world as a soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, and teacher. He has played with major orchestras worldwide, including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, The Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, the orchestras of Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Philadelphia, Montréal and all the major orchestras of Australia and New Zealand. Conductors with whom he has worked include Rattle, Gergiev, Dutoit, Elder, Skrowasczewski and Marriner. He has been a regular guest at the BBC Proms, has twice toured Australia, and has recently played concertos with the London Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony and Halle Orchestra.

Last season Colin performed cycles of Beethoven’s complete works for cello and piano with his duo partner Thomas Sauer throughout the United States and in England, Germany and France. They have recently played recitals together at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Philadelphia’s Chamber Music Society and at the Wigmore Hall. 

Colin has also played several cycles of the Bach Solo Suites at the Wigmore Hall in London, in the United States at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York and the Gardner Museum in Boston and in Montreal, Toronto, Ottowa and Vancouver.

Colin’s recordings for GM of the Bach Suites and the unaccompanied cello works of Kodaly, Britten, Crumb, and Schuller are highly acclaimed, as is his recent recording of the complete cello/piano works of Mendelssohn with Thomas Sauer on Cello Classics. The Brahms Sonatas on Arabesque, with pianist Lee Luvisi, is also a favorite and the Wigmore Live Label will release a new recording of the Bach Suites in 2012. Colin was the soloist in Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic for a BBC Music Magazine recording.

As a member of the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio, he recorded and toured extensively for 20 years. Chamber music plays an important role in his musical life. He is a frequent visitor to international chamber music festivals worldwide and has appeared often as a guest with the Guarneri and Emerson string quartets and with New York’s Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In 2012 he recorded the string sextets of Schoenberg and Tchaikovsky with the Emerson String Quartet and Paul Neubauer.

Colin is the winner of many prestigious international awards, including First Prize in the Naumburg Competition, the Gregor Piatigorsky Memorial Award and Second Prize in the Rostropovich International Cello Competition.

He first played the cello at the age of five. Three years later he went to the Yehudi Menuhin School, where he studied with Maurice Gendron and later William Pleeth. He was made a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in 1998, having been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston for 16 years. In 1998, St. John’s College, Oxford created the post of “Musician in Residence” for him, and in September 2002 he became a professor at Stony Brook University in New York.

Mr. Carr’s cello was made by Matteo Gofriller in Venice in 1730. He makes his home with his wife Caroline and 3 children, Clifford, Frankie and Anya, in an old house outside Oxford.