Roger Tapping

Viola

Roger Tapping joined the Juilliard Quartet and Juilliard’s viola faculty in 2013. Previously, he had moved from London to the U.S. in 1995 to join the Takács Quartet. During his decade with them, their career included many Beethoven and Bartók cycles in major cities all over the world. Their Decca/London recordings, including the complete quartets of Bartók and Beethoven, placed them in Gramophone magazine’s Hall of Fame and won three Gramophone Awards, a Grammy and three more Grammy nominations, among many other awards. Tapping taught regularly at the Aspen Festival, the Taos Quartet School, and London’s Guildhall School of Music.

In recent years he has been on the viola faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he also directed the Chamber Music program. He also taught at the Longy School in Cambridge and the Boston Conservatory. In the summers he has served on the faculties of Itzhak Perlman’s Chamber Music Workshop, the Tanglewood String Quartet Seminar and Yellow Barn, and he has given viola master classes at Banff. He has also given viola and chamber music master classes at other festivals and conservatories in the U.S. and Canada.

Born in England, Tapping played in a number of London’s leading chamber ensembles, making several highly acclaimed albums, before joining Britain’s longest established quartet, the Allegri. He taught at London’s Royal Academy of Music, was principal viola of the London Mozart Players, a member of the English Chamber Orchestra and a founding member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He has performed frequently as a guest with many distinguished quartets from the U.S. and Europe, and he was a member of the Boston Chamber Music Society.

His teachers were Margaret Major and Bruno Giuranna and he participated in master classes with William Primrose. He holds degrees from the University of Cambridge. Tapping is a member of the Order of the Knight Cross of the Hungarian Republic, has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Nottingham, and is a Fellow of the Guildhall School of Music in London.