French violinist Alexandra Soumm is a multi-faceted, versatile artist who is equally at home in concerto and chamber repertoire. She has appeared with the London Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, among many others. She has given recitals at the Louvre, Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts and London Wigmore Hall, and has also appeared at the Verbier, Schleswig-Holstein, Deauville Easter and City of London festivals, as well as the Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad.
Soumm’s strongest ties are to France and England where she has ongoing relationships with many leading orchestras in Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Montpellier and most of the BBC ensembles, with whom she worked as a former BBC 3 New Generation Artist and London Music Masters awardee.
Born in Moscow, Soumm started to learn the violin at the age of five and gave her first concert two years later. She later moved to Vienna to study with the renowned pedagogue Boris Kuschnir and won the Eurovision Young Musicians contest in 2004. In 2012, along with two friends, she founded the non-profit organisation Esperanz’Arts, whose goal is to make all art forms accessible to people in schools, hospitals, prisons and homeless shelters. She was named Godmother of El Sistema France.
Passionate about teaching and communicating her artistry, Soumm has loved her work with the Youth Orchestra of the Americas, Animato Foundation, Sphinx Foundation and Orchestre Français des Jeunes, and has been involved with the Seiji Ozawa International Academy in Switzerland for over 10 years. She has given masterclasses in the USA, Venezuela, Brazil, the UK, Japan, Israel and Kenya. She joined the Artistic and Pedagogical Committee of the Mundi School based in Belgium in 2018, and began teaching at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Wien from 2021.
Soumm champions a wide range of repertoire, from Baroque to contemporary music, as well as the transversality between the arts, creating numerous projects around poetry, literature and philosophy. She works regularly with contemporary composers such as Christoph Ehrenfellner who composed a string quartet and his Second Violin Concerto for her, Kryštof Mařatka, Benoît Menut, Emile Daems, and Eric Tanguy who composed a piece for soprano and piano based on her poem “Cercle”.
Soumm plays on a Goffredo Cappa violin made around 1700.
