Max Welford
Clarinet
Max Welford graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in 2012. He has performed in the UK, Europe, the USA and Asia, and is a Park Lane Group Young Artist and a Concordia Foundation Artist.
Recent solo performances include recitals at the Wigmore Hall, the Purcell Room, St. James’ Piccadilly, and the National Portrait Gallery; Benjamin Britten’s Clarinet Concerto (completed by Colin Matthews), Steve Reich’s “New York Counterpoint” for clarinet and tape at St. John’s Smith Square, and solo sets of Bach, Stravinsky, Widmann and Berio for the Nonclassical label. He will make his St. Martin-in-the-Fields solo debut in 2017. Chamber Music partners have included singers Nicky Spence, Caroline Macphie and Joanna Skillett, ensembles such as the London Chamber Collective, the Ruisi, Artesian and Castalian String Quartets, and the late Jacob Barnes, with whom he won the RAM’s piano chamber music prize performing Brahms’ clarinet trio.
Max collaborates with a number of contemporary ensembles which have recently included CHROMA, the London Contemporary Orchestra, the Uroboros Ensemble, Trish Clowes’ jazz/contemporary ensemble the Emulsion Sinfonietta (featuring saxophonist Ian Ballamy), and the Riot Ensemble. He has worked with composers including Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Mark Anthony Turnage and Colin Matthews, and has given world premieres at the Royal Opera House, King’s Place, Glyndebourne, on BBC Radio 3, at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore and at the Pyramidale Festival in Berlin.
Max can also be heard on recordings with the English Session Orchestra, Katie Melua, Imogen Heap, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and Rick Wakeman. He has held chairs on the UK tours of “The Sound of Music” and “Chicago”, and is currently playing the clarinet in the West End production of “Half a Sixpence”.
Max has been taught by Andrew Marriner, Mark van de Wiel, Angela Malsbury and Elizabeth Drew, and more recently in Berlin by Wenzel Fuchs of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He studied at the Junior Royal Academy of Music before accepting a scholarship to continue his studies as an undergraduate in 2008, receiving further training as a student on both the LSO and London Sinfonietta Academies.