About the Artist

Violist Marcus Thompson is serving his fifteenth season as Artistic Director of the Boston Chamber Music Society with a series of eight concerts at Sanders Theatre (Harvard University), Jordan Hall (Boston), and First Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has appeared in chamber music series and festivals throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and as guest of the Audubon, Borromeo, Cleveland, Da Ponte Endellion, Parker and Vermeer String Quartets, and with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has played recitals on series at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the National Gallery in Washington D.C. He has appeared as soloist with The Atlanta Symphony, Boston POPS, The Chicago Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Czech National Symphony, and the St. Louis Symphony. He has recorded Hindemith’s Der Schwanendreher with the MIT Symphony Orchestra, Bartok’s Viola Concerto with the Llubljana Radio Symphony, John Harbison’s Viola
Concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), commissioned and premiered Olly Wilson’s Viola Concerto with the Rochester Philharmonic. Born and raised in the South Bronx, Mr. Thompson earned the doctorate in viola performance from The Juilliard School in 1970 following viola and viola d’amore studies
with Walter Trampler, and chamber music with the Juilliard, Amadeus, and Netherlands String Quartets. He is founder of the chamber music and private study programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he became a professor of Music in 1973. He has been a member of the viola faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music since 1983. In 2015 he was appointed Institute Professor at MIT and in 2022 awarded the prestigious Career Achievement Award by the American Viola Society.