Santiago Cañón-Valencia

At six Santiago Cañón-Valencia played his first concerto with the Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá, the orchestra of the city he was born in, in 1995; he returned to it as soloist in 2022, by then a cellist with an international career. He studied with Henryk Zarzycki in Colombia, James Tennant in New Zealand, Andrés Díaz in the United States and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt at the Kronberg Academy, and took first prizes at the Carlos Prieto competition and the Beijing International before the two results that made his name: third prize at the Queen Elisabeth in 2017 and, in 2019, the silver medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, where the audience voted him its favourite. The Starker Foundation gave him its award in 2018; the BBC made him a New Generation Artist in 2022, the year of his album Ascenso for Sono Luminus, and a Wigmore Hall debut followed. He records as a composer as well as a cellist — Ouróboros, his own piece, appeared on Deutsche Grammophon in 2024 with the pianist Naoko Sonoda, alongside Pärt's Fratres. Earlier discs include Russian cello sonatas with Katherine Austin and, in 2020, Schubert and Beethoven with Andrea Lucchesini. He has been supported since 2011 by the Mayra and Edmundo Esquenazi scholarship of the Salvi Foundation, and took first prizes at the Gisborne and Lennox competitions as well. Among the orchestras he has played with are the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony under Christoph Eschenbach, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic under Nikolai Alexeev and Yuri Bashmet's Moscow Soloists. He commissions and premieres new work, giving the first performances of Carlos Izcaray's cello concerto with the Alabama Symphony and of Jorge Pinzon's Rapsodia a los 4 Elementos at Cartagena, the Colombian premiere of Ginastera's Second Cello Concerto and the Auckland premiere of Gulda's concerto.