Kelly Hall-Tompkins

The American violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins is a native of Greenville, South Carolina. She began her training at the Fine Arts Center in her hometown and received her bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music and her master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music. She began her career as the winner of the Naumburg International Violin Competition Honorarium Prize; she was also awarded the Concert Artists Guild Career Grant and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence. Kelly Hall-Tompkins was the inaugural artist-in-residence with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and has appeared as a soloist with the Baltimore, Dallas, Jacksonville, Oakland, and Greensboro symphony orchestras. She has given recitals at Lincoln Center in New York and in Toronto, Washington, D. C., Chicago, and Paris, as well as at the Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Santa Fe festivals. She regularly collaborates with Leonard Slatkin, with whom she recently gave the world premiere of a new violin concerto by Jeff Beal at the St. Louis Symphony. She has also worked with the Chineke! Orchestra. Hall-Tompkins is the first violinist to perform Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto following its dedicatee, Nicola Benedetti. Her theater experience includes playing the “Fiddler” violin soloist in the Broadway production marking the 50th anniversary of Jerry Bock’s musical Fiddler on the Roof; she recorded new arrangements of this music on her solo disc The Fiddler: Expanding Tradition. Hall-Tompkins is also deeply committed to social justice: in 2005 she founded Music Kitchen — Food for the Soul, which to date has presented more than 100 classical music performances for people experiencing homelessness. She has commissioned pieces by 15 composers for Forgotten Voices, a song cycle to texts by homeless-shelter clients which was ­premiered at a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert in 2022. Kelly Hall-Tompkins teaches at the Manhattan School of Music. The New York Times named her “New Yorker of the Year” in 2017.

July 2024