Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks - BRSO
Thomas Reif © BR\Astrid Ackermann

Thomas Reif

1st Violin
1st Concertmaster

Born in Regensburg in 1991, Thomas Reif received his training on the violin from Harald Herzl (Salzburg Mozarteum), Tanja Becker-Bender (Hamburg University of Music and Theatre) and Stephan Picard (Hanns Eisler University of Music, Berlin), with additional influences from Midori, Igor Ozim, Ferenc Rados, Vadim Gluzman, Thomas Riebl, Eberhard Feltz and Christian Altenburger. Besides a good many prizes and awards from competitions, including the International Mozart Competition (Salzburg and Augsburg), the Queen Elisabeth Competition (Brussels) and the Johannes Brahms Competition (Pörtschach), he was honoured in Salzburg with the Ian Stoutzker Prize in Memory of Yehudi Menuhin (2012). He developed a love for the orchestra at an early age when he joined the National Youth Orchestra and has performed in Europe, Asia and the United States as a soloist, concertmaster and chamber musician.

Thomas Reif already served as concertmaster in the Munich and Vienna chamber orchestras and the Chamber Orchestra of the Palatinate in Mannheim before assuming this position with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra on 1 November 2018. He has appeared in a solo capacity with the Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie, the Belgian National Orchestra, the Munich Radio Orchestra, the KNM Ensemble (Berlin), the Chamber Orchestra of the Palatinate (Mannheim), the Carinthian Symphony Orchestra, the Theatre Orchestra of Lower Saxony and the Salzburg Chamber Soloists. He has performed in such leading venues as the Berlin Konzerthaus, the Great Hall of the Mozarteum Foundation (Salzburg), the Stuttgart Liederhalle, Meistersinger Hall (Nuremberg), Rudolf Oetker Hall (Bielefeld) and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, playing with conductors of the stature of Paul Meyer, Marin Alsop, Bruno Weil, Ulrich Windfuhr and Douglas Boyd. He will appear with the Las Vegas Philharmonic in the 2019/20 season.

Thomas Reif also plays chamber music with musicians of the calibre of Herbert Schuch, Clemens and Lukas Hagen, Stephan Picard, Wen-Sinn Yang, László Kuti, Barbara Buntrock and Isang Enders. Outside the classical repertoire he performs little-known early music of the 17th century with his own ensembles and Argentine tangos of the 1940s and 1950s as a member of Cuarteto SolTango.

Thomas Reif plays a violin built by Lorenzo Storioni of Cremona in 1789, on loan from a private collection.