“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 artists of our time.
In the 2026/27 season, Alexi debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing the US premiere of Gabriella Smith’s new Violin Concerto with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, which he also performs with the San Francisco Symphony and Dina Slobodeniouk. He debuts with the Atlanta Symphony and Monterey Symphony, and returns to play and direct the Lapland Chamber Orchestra. Alexi will give recitals with pianist Janice Carissa at Carmel Music Society, Carolina Performing Arts, Cleveland Chamber Music Society, and Da Camera Houston, and brings Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society with soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon.
In recent seasons, Alexi has appeared as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Houston Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, and l'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. He 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, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Frick Collection, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
A fierce advocate for new music and always searching for collaborations across art forms, he continues to tour Shifting Ground, a recital program in collaboration with the new media 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. He also frequently explores his love for period instruments and playing, performing the complete Schumann Violin Sonatas on gut strings with Amy Yang on fortepiano and appearing with Philharmonia Baroque.
Chamber music continues to be a major part of Alexi’s life, performing at festivals including Caramoor, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Northwest, La Jolla, Ojai, Marlboro, 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 Gabriel Cabezas, and cellist-composer Paul Wiancko. Alexi is an alum of the Bowers Program at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Born in Palo Alto, California, 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. The recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, as well as winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition, Alexi has been profiled by 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, 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.”
