Robert Holliday

Robert Holliday is Sub-Principal Trombone with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music and Guildhall School of Music & Drama during which time he won the silver medal in the Shell/LSO Scholarship and, with his trombone quartet Bone Idols, the Royal Overseas League Chamber Music Competition. He was also a member of the European Union Youth Orchestra and Foden’s Band.

For the past thirty years he has been in demand as an orchestral and chamber musician, working most recently with the London Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia, CBSO and Hallé. He was a regular guest principal with the Royal Northern Sinfonia before taking up his current position at Covent Garden in 2015. Outside the UK he has worked with the Vienna Philharmonic, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, RTÉ Symphony Orchestra and Ensemble Modern and has toured extensively throughout Europe, USA, Central and South America, China, Hong Kong and Japan. A former principal trombonist with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, he has also held the sub-principal trombone positions with the BBC Philharmonic and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestras and has played on many TV and film soundtracks such as Star Wars: Episode ll, Cutthroat Island, Zero Dark Thirty, Unbroken, Fury, Power Rangers, Smurfs: The Lost Village and Harry Potter video games. In 2000 he performed the world premiere of Ivor Hodgson’s trombone concerto, a piece written for him, which he subsequently performed with the BBC Philharmonic and as a guest soloist at the RNCM’s Festival of Brass.

Robert has been a trombone tutor at the RNCM since 2000 and the Royal College of Music since 2018 and frequently sits on examination panels at conservatoires and universities in the UK. In June 2015 the Royal Academy of Music Trombone Choir gave the first complete performance of his arrangement for 12 trombones of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ in London.