ROSL Annual Music Competition announces Solo Strings category winner

Guitarist Jack Hancher has been announced as winner of the Solo Strings category of this year’s ROSL Annual Music Competition, earning a cash prize of £5,000. Hancher is now the fourth solo section final winner of the competition and has completed the line-up for the competition’s Gold Medal Final in July.

Hancher beat the section’s three other soloists - violinists Kryštof Kohout and Madeleine Pickering and violist Toby Cook – to win the section prize at the ROSL’s Princess Alexandra Hall.

Hancher won the Royal College of Music Guitar Award in 2014 and completed his studies at RCM in 2018. As well as being named a 2021 EuroStrings Artist, Hancher has won prizes at the Zagreb Guitar and Plovdiv GuitArt Festival Competitions.

The competition section’s panel of adjudicators including ROSL Arts artistic director Geoff Parkin, Cellist and Royal Academy of Music head of strings Jo Cole, violinist Fenella Humphreys, cellist Ashok Klouda made the exceptional decision to split the competition’s Len Lickorish Memorial Award of £1,000 between the three other finalists in recognition of their talent.

ROSL Annual Music Competition section finals continue each Tuesday evening at Over-Seas House in London, with the Gold Medal Final taking place on 7 July at Wigmore Hall.

The ROSL Annual Music Competition grew out of a series of concerts inaugurated in 1947 and became competitive in 1952. A list of past competition winners can be found here.

You can find more information about the ROSL Annual Music Competition at the ROSL website.