Violinist Wilma Smith receives 2025 Sir Bernard Heinze Memorial Award

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The 2025 recipient of the Sir Bernard Heinze Memorial Award has been announced as Fiji-born violinist Wilma Smith. Awarded annually by the University of Melbourne and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, it recognises outstanding contributions to music in Australia.

Smith grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, and is a graduate of Auckland University. She later studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston, US, with renowned violin pedagogues Dorothy DeLay and Louis Krasner.

Smith has led an extensive career as a chamber musician. She was a founding member of the Lydian Quartet, which won competitions including the Portsmouth, Evian, and Banff international string quartet competitions, and was the recipient of the Naumburg Award for Chamber Music. Smith then returned to New Zealand and became the founding first violinist of the celebrated New Zealand String Quartet. Smith is currently the second violinist of the Melbourne-based Flinders Quartet.

As an orchestral musician, she has served as concertmaster of the New Zealand and Melbourne symphony orchestras, the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra, the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, and has performed regularly with the Australian World Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Smith is currently artistic director of competitions for Musica Viva Australia, a board director for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and is co-artistic director of the Martinborough Music Festival. She also curates the Wilma & Friends chamber music series.

The award was created in honour of conductor Sir Bernard Heinze (1894–1982), who held the title of Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne for thirty years and was a leading figure in the Australian orchestral scene. He was recognised as Australian of the Year in 1974.

This year’s Sir Bernard Heinze Memorial Award was bestowed by Professor Gary McPherson, the Ormond Chair of Music at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music:

‘Wilma Smith’s list of achievements is extraordinary and beyond any doubt an example of the finest Australia has to offer the international music scene… Her career is replete with rave reviews from critics and conductors who have admired her outstanding performances as a violinist of the highest calibre,’ he said.

‘Across her career she has maintained her reputation as an orchestral and chamber music specialist with longstanding musical partnerships with renowned New Zealand and Australian musicians. Importantly, Wilma is known for mentoring young musicians and the opportunities she has given many now well-known professionals at the beginning of their musical careers.

‘We celebrate her abilities as a violinist and thank her for the countless memories we have of performances she has given across the past four decades.’

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