David Watkin

As a soloist and as principal cellist in several major ensembles, David Watkin was an important figure in the early music movement in London. He was also active as a conductor and an inspiring and good-natured educator. Watkin was noted for a pioneering recording of Beethoven's cello sonatas. He recorded as a conductor after illness brought his cello playing to an end, and appeared on the 2023 album Symphonic Chronicles, Vol. 1, with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Watkin was born on May 8, 1965, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, England. His father was a violin teacher. He took both private lessons and school lessons at Wells Cathedral School as a youth and became a member of Britain's National Youth Orchestra. Watkin attended St. Catharine's College at Cambridge University as a choral scholar (a singer who receives discounted tuition in exchange for performing at university functions). He studied musicology but also continued cello studies with William Pleeth and voice with Kenneth Bowen. In the late '80s and early '90s, he worked as a freelance cellist in London, and he gave his debut recital at St. John's, Smith Square in London in 1989. Watkin became interested in performing on historical instruments after researching and writing about them. With the Trio Veracini, he performed Corelli's Violin Sonatas, Op. 5, realizing the figured bass on the cello after writing an article about the work. By 1990, he had made his recording debut (as a bass viol player) on the album The Musical Life of Samuel Pepys. In 1992, he appeared as a cellist on the album The English Nightingale: Virtuoso Recorder Music by recorder player Piers Adams. Watkin held positions as principal cellist with the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Baroque Soloists, and L'Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. As he worked with the latter, he became interested in the possibilities of using historical instruments and scored a breakthrough with a well-reviewed recording with Howard Moody, Beethoven: Sonatas for Piano and Cello, on the Chandos label in 1995. That year, he also recorded the complete cello sonatas of Vivaldi for the Hyperion label. With the Eroica Quartet, which he joined in 1999, he recorded works of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Robert Schumann. He conducted broad investigations into the sound of stringed instruments in the 19th century, asserting that the vibrato that became common in modern playing was deployed only for special expressive effect. He performed with the Philharmonia Orchestra and for many years with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which he conducted after he began to suffer from an autoimmune disease, scleroderma. Watkin led that group on the 2023 album Symphonic Chronicles, Vol. 1. He died on May 13, 2025. ~ James Manheim, Rovi