Teenage violinist Sofia Demetriades wins BBC Young Musician 2026
Violinist Sofia Demetriades, 18, has won the BBC Young Musician competition in the first all-female final in its 48-year history.
Eighteen-year-old violinist Sofia Demetriades has won BBC Young Musician 2026, the BBC's classical music competition for young performers in the UK. This year's final was the first in the contest's 48-year history to feature only female finalists.
The judges, Joanna MacGregor, Ben Gernon and Errollyn Wallen, praised Demetriades's performance of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto for its insight, poetry and maturity. She is from Leicestershire and is in her first year of undergraduate study at the Royal Academy of Music.
How the competition worked
Humphrey Burton created the biennial competition in 1978. Its finalists have included Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Alison Balsom, Stephen Hough and, in 2004, Nicola Benedetti, who had been the most recent violinist to win.
Several hundred entrants sent video applications. Forty young players were chosen for live auditions at Bath Spa University, competing for eight places in the quarter-finals, which were held on Demetriades's 18th birthday. Among the quarter-finalists was 14-year-old Sylvester Maschi, the first accordion player to reach the later stages.
In the final at Bristol Beacon, each of the three finalists played a concerto with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under conductor Alpesh Chauhan. Saxophonist Kezia Colton, 18, played Takashi Yoshimatsu's Cyber Bird Saxophone Concerto, joined onstage by Jordan Ashman, the percussionist who won in 2022. Recorder player Alma Nunez Debretzeni, 17, performed Graham Fitkin's Recorder Concerto, which uses six different recorders.
Debretzeni said she had not planned to become a musician before the competition and had wanted to study psychology, but the experience made her want to pursue music.
Prize
The winner receives the trophy and a £3,000 cash prize towards music studies, plus recording and broadcast opportunities on BBC Radio 3, including with a BBC ensemble. All three finalists will work with the Young Classical Artists Trust on managing their future careers.
Demetriades said that becoming the winner was her absolute dream and that she hopes to play alongside her fellow finalists again soon.
