Daniel Rowland

Dutch-British violinist Daniel Rowland has established himself on the international scene as a highly versatile, communicative, charismatic and adventurous performer, with a flourishing career as a soloist, chamber musician and director. His playing has been praised as “wonderful, ravishing in its finesse” by The Guardian and as “both naked and 
highly virtuosic” by Dutch daily NRC. “When it can be hard these days to differentiate between the top violinists’ individual sounds, Rowland truly sounds like nobody else,” as a rave review in Gramophone Magazine proclaimed.

As a soloist, Daniel performs with orchestras all over the world, from the northern part of Norway to Cape Town. Together with leading conductors such as Heinz Holliger, Jaap van Zweden, François-Xavier Roth, Lawrence Foster and Antony Hermus, he has performed violin concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Elgar, Berg, Korngold, Prokofiev, Schnittke, Glass, Lindberg, Vasks and Saariaho in recent seasons. In 2023, Daniel toured Europe as soloist/director with the European Union Youth Orchestra, and performed concertos with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, Phion Orchestra, Belgrade Philharmonic and Cape Town Philharmonic. He is a passionate advocate of contemporary concertos, and composers such as Pēteris Vasks, Roxanna Panufnik, Isidora Žebeljan, Elena Firsova, Aftab Darvishi and Olli Mustonen have dedicated pieces to him. A passionate chamber musician, Daniel has performed with artists as diverse as Ivry Gitlis, Heinz Holliger, Martha Argerich, Gilles Apap, Michael Collins, Vladimir Mendelssohn, Lars Vogt and Sir Willard White. After leading the renowned Brodsky Quartet for twelve years until 2019, Daniel founded the Arethusa Quartet in 2023. The new string quartet brings together the like-minded spirits of violist Dana Zemtsov, cellist Maja Bogdanović and violinist Floor Le Coultre. A frequent guest of the major international chamber music festivals, Daniel is also part of acclaimed duo partnerships with pianist Natacha Kudritskaya (“a perfect partnership” - BBC Music Magazine), and with cellist Maja Bogdanović (“a magical meeting between violin and cello” - NRC Handelsblad). Daniel is a founding member of a cutting edge Tango Quintet with bandoneon virtuoso/composer Marcelo Nisinman. Having grown up in the bucolic region of Twente in the eastern part of the Netherlands, Daniel founded the Stift International Music Festival there in 2004. The festival has garnered great international acclaim as one of great intimacy, adventure and atmosphere, with many premieres, and with world famous musicians performing side-by-side with the Stift Young Artists. The festival celebrates its 20th anniversary in August 2024. Daniel was born in London and grew up in the Netherlands, studying with Jan Repko, Davina van Wely, Herman Krebbers, Viktor Liberman and Igor Oistrakh. Meeting Ivry Gitlis in 1995 led to lessons in Paris and subsequently to many musical collaborations. His violin is by Lorenzo Storioni (Cremona 1796) and his bow is a Maline, kindly loaned by the NMF (Dutch Instrument Foundation). Daniel teaches at the Royal College of Music in London and lives in Amsterdam with his wife, cellist Maja Bogdanović and their two daughters.