Olivia Ziani was born in London in 1999 and began playing the violin aged 6. She is currently studying with Yossi Zivoni at the Royal College of Music, where she is a Musicians’ Company Lambert Scholar.
Olivia enjoys playing and performing in a variety of settings as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral violinist. As a soloist, she has performed in the UK, Algeria and Germany, and in venues including St Martin-in-the-Fields, St James’s Church Piccadilly, St John’s Church Waterloo and the Marlowe Theatre. She has appeared twice as the concerto soloist with the Ashford Baroque Ensemble in performances of Mozart and Bach, and gave a solo recital as part of Leeds International Concert Season 2017. As a chamber musician, Olivia won first prize in the Pro Corda National Chamber Music Festival in 2015 with her string quartet, and has played in ensembles across all kinds of different genres, including jazz, pop, contemporary, baroque and classical.
Olivia is currently the principal second violin of Capital Orchestra and has recently performed as principal second violin with the RCM Philharmonic Orchestra and the RCM Opera Orchestra. She was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain from 2014-2017, where she performed thrice at the BBC Proms, recorded a well-received CD for Chandos, and performed in Festival Berlioz 2017 in France, and more recently, in 2019, Olivia was a member of the Britten Shostakovich Festival Orchestra for their inaugural season, with whom she toured Russia and the UK. Olivia was also selected as a Britten-Pears Young Artist in 2020. As an orchestral musician, Olivia has performed in some of the country’s most prestigious venues, such as the Royal Festival Hall, Royal Albert Hall, Bridgewater Hall, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall and Barbican Hall, and abroad in venues including the Philharmonic Hall in St. Petersburg, as well as work with some renowned conductors including Sir Mark Elder, Thomas Ades, Nicholas Collon, Vladimir Jurowski, Edward Gardner and John Wilson.
Olivia has performed in solo masterclasses with Chloe Hanslip, Tasmin Little, Marc Danel, Peter Herresthal and Anna Kandinskaya, and chamber music masterclasses with Alberto Bologni and the Wihan Quartet. In 2019, she attended the Voksenasen Summer Academy. She has also performed with the Palestine Youth Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Alongside her classical studies, Olivia appears frequently as a television violinist crossing over to the pop genre, having worked professionally on The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, and Michael McIntyre’s Big Show. She is currently in the process of recording the debut album for the jazz fusion ensemble Kalpadruma.
Olivia is an alumnus of the Purcell School and the junior department of Trinity College of Music.
