Tomo Keller was born in Stuttgart to German-Japanese musicians and started playing the violin at the age of six. At ten years old he gave his first solo performances with orchestra, going on to study at Vienna’s University for Music and Performing Arts and New York’s Juilliard School of Music. Numerous top prizes and awards followed: the Fritz Kreisler Competition, the Johannes Brahms Competition and the German Music Competition Berlin where he was awarded the Grand Prize. He has since performed at major concert halls all around the world and has been invited to music festivals including the Schleswig Holstein Musik Festival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Edinburgh Festival and Bravo! Vail Colorado. He has also been a frequent guest on radio and television broadcasts on ARD, BBC, NHK and ORF.
He is a much sought-after orchestral leader and director, having led the London Symphony Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and has also appeared with more than 20 orchestras as guest leader across Europe, the USA and Asia. Tomo Keller was appointed Director and Leader of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in 2016 and appears with them worldwide as leader, director, chamber musician and soloist.
As a soloist, he has also performed with the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, St Petersburg Camerata, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Concert tours have led him all across Europe, as well as to Russia, Asia, America and the Middle East.
In the 2021/22 season, he was Artist in Residence at the Loh-Orchestra Sondershausen in Germany, featuring as soloist, director and conductor, and premiered a new piece written for him by Christoph Ehrenfellner. "Wiener G’schichten" also received its UK premiere in London with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in 2022.
His recordings include solo works by Bach, Bartók and Ysaÿe, orchestral recordings including Stravinsky’s "Apollon musagète" with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the London Symphony Orchestra and the Grammy Award winning "Avant Gershwin" with Patti Austin and the WDR Big Band. In 2020 a DVD/CD box set with all Beethoven piano concertos was released by Deutsche Grammophon to great critical acclaim, featuring pianist Jan Lisiecki, with Tomo Keller directing the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. A CD with works by Kurt Atterberg will soon be released on Ondine, featuring the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Tomo Keller as soloist and director in Atterberg’s Suite for violin and viola.
He has given violin, chamber music and orchestral master classes at all major London Music Colleges as well as at Yale University and numerous other schools in the USA and the Far East. In early 2022 he was appointed Professor of violin at the HEMU Sion in Switzerland.
Tomo Keller plays a fine violin by Antonio Stradivari known as the "ex-Braga/bell", kindly loaned to him through the Beare’s International Violin Society.