“a spellbinding, thoroughly honest performance that revealed his architect’s eye for structure and space and a tone that ranges from the achingly fragile to full-bodied robustness.”
Violinist Alexi Kenney is forging a career that defies categorization, following his interests, intuition, and heart. He is equally at home creating experimental programs, commissioning new works, soloing with major orchestras around the world, and collaborating with some of the most celebrated musicians of our time. Alexi is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award.
Alexi begins the 2025/26 season with his return to the Pittsburgh Symphony, performing the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Manfred Honeck. He also returns to the San Francisco Symphony in a program of his own curation as soloist and leader, as well as to the Dallas Symphony playing Barber's Violin Concerto with Daniele Rustioni. Alexi debuts with the Houston Symphony and Slovak Philharmonic performing Sofia Gubaidulina's Violin Concerto “in tempus praesens” with Juraj Valcuha, as well as with Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the Santa Barbara Symphony, Wichita Symphony, and Erie Philharmonic. Honoring his experimental nature, Alexi curates San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox in February 2026. Recital and chamber appearances include the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society in a special program celebrating queer composers on National Coming Out Day, the Phillips Collection, 92nd Street Y, and Spoleto Festival. Highlights of recent seasons include concertos with the Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Detroit Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Indianapolis Symphony, Gulbenkian Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, and l’Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. Alexi has been featured in a play/lead role with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and New Century Chamber Orchestra, and has played recitals at Wigmore Hall, on Carnegie Hall’s ‘Distinctive Debuts’ series, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Frick Collection, Mecklenberg-Vorpommern Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Alexi continues to perform and develop Shifting Ground, a multimedia program in collaboration with the video artist Xuan, which weaves together pieces for violin and electronics by J.S. Bach, Rafiq Bhatia, Matthew Burtner, Mario Davidovsky, Salina Fisher, Nicola Matteis, Angélica Negrón, and Paul Wiancko. Alexi has performed Shifting Ground at the Celebrity Series of Boston, Ojai Festival, and Baryshnikov Arts Center, among others. He also explores his love for period instruments and playing, recently performing the complete Schumann Violin Sonatas on gut strings with Amy Yang on fortepiano.
Chamber music continues to be a major part of Alexi’s life, regularly performing at festivals including Caramoor, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Northwest, Kronberg, La Jolla, Ojai, Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Ravinia, Seattle, and Spoleto. He is a founding member of Owls—an inverted quartet hailed as a “dream group” by The New York Times—alongside violist Ayane Kozasa, cellist Gabe Cabezas, and cellist-composer Paul Wiancko. Alexi is also an alum of the Bowers Program (formerly CMS 2) at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Born in Palo Alto, California in 1994, Alexi is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he studied with Donald Weilerstein and Miriam Fried. Previous mentors in the Bay Area include Wei He, Jenny Rudin, and Natasha Fong. Winner of the 2013 Concert Artists Guild Competition and laureate of the 2012 Menuhin Competition, Alexi has been profiled by Musical America, Strings Magazine, and The New York Times, and has written for The Strad. He plays a violin made in London by Stefan-Peter Greiner in 2009 and a bow made in Port Townsend, Washington by Charles Espey in 2024.
Outside of music, Alexi enjoys hojicha, modernist design and architecture, baking for friends (especially this lumberjack cake), and walking for miles on end in whichever city he finds himself, listening to podcasts and Bach on repeat.
“When an artist has truly mastered his craft, there’s a level of communication that surpasses the mundane and the misty and speaks directly to the listener. At Friday’s Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concert at Heinz Hall, violinist Alexi Kenney delivered a spectacular account of Bartok’s second violin concerto, his charisma conjuring a conversational style at once bravura and intimate…Truly a marvelous performance.”
