Leaders

Matthew Lloyd-Wilson

Matthew Lloyd-Wilson (b. 1999) is a British musician and conductor whose work is distinguished by clarity of gesture, disciplined rehearsal technique, and a strongly collaborative approach to music-making. His developing career has been marked by rapid progression and significant international recognition. He is the youngest-ever Principal Conductor of the University of Southampton Symphony Orchestra and a recent winner of the International Hans Swarowsky Conducting Competition in Milan. This season takes Matthew to Italy, Serbia, Albania, Czechia and France.

  • Matthew’s musical path began at an unusually early age. Immersed in music from childhood, he sang live on international television at the age of eleven to an audience of over two billion people, before making his BBC Proms debut at twelve and conducting his first public concert a year later. His performances have been attended by figures including the late Queen Elizabeth II, HRH King Charles III, Pope Benedict XVI, Barack Obama, and the 14th Dalai Lama. These early experiences in high-profile performance environments shaped his calm authority on the podium, efficient communication with musicians, and sensitivity to musical intention at every level of ensemble.

    Alongside his conducting, Matthew has maintained an active career as a violinist. He has performed at the Royal Albert Hall with artists including YUNGBLUD, Ed Sheeran, Liam Gallagher, Madness, and Don Broco, contributing to fundraising efforts exceeding £2 million for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

    A former music scholar at Winchester College, Matthew later led both the Hampshire and Surrey Youth Orchestras before becoming a professional violinist. During this period, he won five Young Musician of the Year competitions and four concerto competitions. Although trained across piano, organ, and voice, he chose to focus his professional development on violin and conducting, while also studying Mechanical Engineering at university; a discipline that continues to inform his analytical approach to score study and rehearsal planning.

    Music education forms a central pillar of Matthew’s work. While at university, he became Music Director of the Guildford Youth Symphony Orchestra, transforming the ensemble into a self-sufficient charity that now provides free orchestral training to more than 200 young musicians each year. He is a professor on the National String Course, an ensembles coach at the Royal Grammar School Guildford, and an adjudicator for the Haslemere International String Competition. He maintains a close association with the RGS String Scheme and recently reprised his role as narrator in Jonathan Willcocks’ orchestral setting of How the Whale Got His Throat by Rudyard Kipling.

Amalia Young

Amalia Young is a London-based violinist and violist working across contemporary, experimental, and classical music. As a chamber and session musician, her career has spanned performances throughout the UK, Europe, and the US. .

  • Her work on the UK's experimental music scene has included appearances at concert series such as Music We'd Like to Hear, the London Contemporary Music Festival, Kammer Klang, and 840, as well as performing onstage at the Royal Opera House in Sarah Angliss's Giant. Her ensemble activities have included projects with Riot Ensemble, Plus-Minus Ensemble, and Apartment House. With the latter, she has performed variously in the UK, at Ensems Festival in Valencia and recorded albums of music by composers such as Morton Feldman, Eden Lonsdale, and Kory Reeder. She performed at the Aldeburgh Festival as a Britten Pears Young Artist for 2024-25, with the Britten Pears Contemporary Ensemble in 2022, and with Les Marteaux in Cassandra Miller's Bel Canto. Her solo and chamber performances have taken her to, amongst others, LSO St Luke's, Café OTO, St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Holywell Music Room, the Royal Over-Seas League House, the Ashmolean Museum, De Montfort Hall, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Several of her performances, including with Plus-Minus, the London Contemporary Music Festival Orchestra, and her recording of Jordan Hunt’s Two, Alone for solo violin, have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

    Amalia is a member of the Komuna Collective, who toured their debut album Views From The Real World across the UK and at the Classical:NEXT 2025 conference in Berlin. Their work has been supported by Arts Council England, Oxford Cultural Programme, and the PRS Foundation. She is also a member of standard issue, who have performed experimental and improvised music extensively across the UK. 

    Amalia also serves on the artistic board of Swedish organisation Hjorted Art and Music, whose annual festival commissions new works and fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between artists. Their activities have been supported by the Swedish Arts Council, Svensk-Norska Samarbetsfoden, and the Anglo-Swedish Society.  

    As a pop and session player, her recent engagements have included touring with Pete Tong and the Essential Orchestra; performing with chamber folk band Tendertwin across the UK, notably at the Aldeburgh Festival, Outer Town Festival, and Left of The Dial in Rotterdam; and recording orchestral strings (recent credits include David Lowery’s Mother Mary, Paul Weller, Sampha).

    Deeply invested in music education and community engagement, Amalia has worked regularly as an instrumental tutor for Sound and Music's annual summer school for young composers and has delivered outreach sessions in schools and care homes across the UK with the Berkeley Ensemble, standard issue, and the Music Mind Spirit Trust (in collaboration with Live Music Now).

    Amalia completed her BMus (Hons) as a scholar at the Royal Academy of Music under Philippe Honoré, receiving the Doris Faulkener violin prize upon graduation and second place in the Winifred Small violin prize. She holds MSt and MMus degrees with distinction from the University of Oxford and Goldsmiths, University of London respectively, where she studied with Mira Benjamin. As a student, she also benefitted from public masterclasses with Elena Urioste, Mandhira de Saram, and Maxim Vengerov, for whom she performed Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. 

    She has studied internationally at the Ensemble Modern Young Ensemble Academy, IMD Darmstadt in the studio of Hae Sun Kang, and with Marco Fusi at the Orpheus Institute's summer artistic research seminars on Giacinto Scelsi and Luigi Nono. 

    Amalia plays an 1893 Ch.J.B. Collin-Mezin violin, which she is grateful to have on loan from the Harrison-Frank Family Foundation.