French cellist Elia Benhamou is currently studying at the Royal College of Music for a Master of Performance with Alexander Chaushian. She received her undergraduate degree at the Haute Ecole de Musique de Lausanne where she was studying with French soloist François Salque. She previously studied at the Conservatoire of Lyon where she obtained the State Music Diploma in Cello, chamber music and composition in 2008. During that time, she participated in masterclasses led by musicians such as Mistlav Rostropovitch, Gautier Capuçon, Nicolas Hartmann, Emmanuelle Bertrand, Frans Helmerson, Johannes Goritzki, Raphael Wallfish and Julian Lloyd Webber.
She won the 2008 Young European Talents of Classical Music Competition (Bnai Brith) in Marseille. She has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in London, Cambridge, Paris, Lausanne, Bucarest in major venues including the Cadogan Hall, the Victoria and Albert Museum, King’s College Chapel, Trinity College Chapel, the Romanian Athenaeum, the Lausanne Palace. She has been invited to play at the Festival des Nuits Romantiques at Aix-les-Bains, the Festival des Musiques Sacrees in Morocco and the Cully Festival in Switzerland.
Elia is part of Clara Quartet, recently formed at the Royal College of Music in 2014. They were notably chosen to record the soundtrack for Hitchcock film The Lodger at Abbey Road Studios.
Elia was part of the Lyon National Orchestra Academy in 2006 and 2007. She was principal cello of the Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra (CUCO) in 2014. At the college, she worked with great conductors such as Vladimir Jurowski, Roger Norrington and Vladimir Ashkenazy and performed at the Royal Festival Hall.
During her music studies in Lausanne, Elia also completed a Bachelor and Master in Bioengineering (specialized in Brain Imaging) at the Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne. She notably led one year of research in Neuroscience at the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge where she looked at the impact of dissonant sounds on human brain.
