David Watkin (1965-2025)

We’ve heard today of the sad death of cellist David Watkin, aged 60, from complications from an autoimmune condition. Earlier this year at the St Endellion Easter Festival, he commented wryly that ‘in February my kidneys suddenly packed in’, a major escalation in a condition that had curtailed his playing since the mid-2010s.

Receiving a threefold musical grounding at Cambridge, where he read music, held a choral scholarship at St Catharine’s and studied cello with William Pleeth, Watkin began garnering attention when he placed as a finalist in the Shell/LSO competition for young musicians, and later served as principal cello in the National Youth Orchestra. 

This proved to be the first of many such chairs - the English Baroque Soloists, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Philharmonia Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Orchestra would all see him sitting at the conductor’s right hand (metaphorically if not literally).

Nor was he a stranger to the podium itself, leading orchestras including the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Malta Philharmonic, Swedish Baroque Orchestra, Academy of Ancient Music and Manchester Consort - as well as a spell as assistant conductor at Glyndebourne.

Watkin was acclaimed as a soloist and a chamber musician, as his recordings of Schubert, Boccherini, Vivaldi, Pott and others attest, not to mention his successful career with the Eroica Quartet. If one judges simply by the sheer number of awards scooped, his 2015 recording of the Bach solo cello suites might be his most successful recording of all - lauded by BBC Music Magazine, Gramophone and others as standing out from a notoriously crowded field.

As his scleroderma progressed, Watkin moved away from performing and towards teaching - taking up the posts of Head of Strings and Professor of Chamber Music at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, who paid tribute to him on social media yesterday as ‘one of the finest cellists of his generation - a master soloist, chamber musician, orchestral leader, and conductor’. He is survived by his two sons.

David Watkin - a selected discography