Biography

Born in Melbourne in 2002, Australian cellist Charlotte Miles is a postgraduate student of Prof. Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt at the Hochschule für Musik “Franz Liszt” in Weimar. A recent graduate of the University of Melbourne and the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) where she studied with Howard Penny, she was the winner of both the 2021 ANAM Concerto Competition and the 2021 ANAM Best Recital Performance Prize. Benefitting from masterclasses with cellists including Jean-Guihen Queyras, Nicolas Altstaedt, Clemens Hagen, Jens-Peter Maintz, Torleif Thedéen, Wen-Sinn Yang, Johannes Goritski, Maria Kliegel, David Finckel and Alban Gerhardt, Charlotte was invited to the prestigious 2016 Piatigorsky International Cello Festival in Los Angeles, where she performed alongside leading cellists such as Mischa Maisky, Truls Mørk, Sol Gabetta and Giovanni Sollima. 

Awarded over 100 Australian and international competition prizes, Charlotte was recently a semi-finalist at the 73rd International ARD Cello Competition in Munich in 2024, winning the special prize of the Mozart-Gesellschaft München, and a semi-finalist at the 4th International Krzysztof Penderecki Cello Competition in Kraków (PL) in 2023.  She has appeared as a soloist with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Kremerata Baltica, ACO Collective, the Corpus Medicorum, Bendigo, Preston, Surrey Hills and Maroondah symphony orchestras and the ANAM Orchestra, amongst numerous others, and was a prize-winner at the 2018 Gisborne (NZ) International Music Competition and the 2020 “Anna Kull” International Cello Competition in Graz (AT). In 2019, she was the 3MBS Radio Young Performer of the Year and winner of the Australian National Young Virtuoso Award.

A passionate chamber musician, highlights of this season include performances at the Landshut (DE), Oxford May (UK) and Stamford International (UK) chamber music festivals, and a collaborative cross-disciplinary project with Jean-Guihen Queyras with performances at the Festival Rencontres Musicales de Haute-Provence (FR) and the Cello Biënnale Amsterdam (NL). Her chamber music collaborators include Timothy Ridout, Ilya Gringolts, Matthew Hunt, Jack Liebeck, Richard Galliano, Peter Laul, Julian Bliss and Charles Owen. Within Australia, she has performed at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, the Sanguine Estate and Bendigo Chamber Music Festivals, the Melbourne Cello Festival, the ACO’s Tarrawarra and Vasse Felix Festivals, and on Australian Digital Concert Hall. She has toured regularly with the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, the Australian Youth Orchestra, and the Staatskapelle Weimar. In 2022, she was an AYO Fellow with both the Melbourne and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, and an Emerging Artist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and has since toured nationally with both the ACO and ACO Collective. In 2024, she is an academist with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. 

Charlotte’s postgraduate studies are generously supported by scholarships from the Australian Music Foundation, the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, the Musical Society of Victoria and the University of Melbourne; she performs on a c.1760 Joseph Hill cello kindly on loan from an Australian collection.