Daniel Orsen is a chamber and orchestral violist and teacher. Since 2022, Orsen has been a member of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, with whom he has performed as soloist in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6. Additionally, he has performed with A Far Cry, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, and as Guest Solo Violist with the Arctic Philharmonic.

Orsen’s chamber festival credits include Krzyzowa, Ravinia, Verbier, Prussia Cove, Oak Hill, and the Perlman Music Program. He has performed chamber music alongside luminaries such as Itzhak Perlman, Kim Kashkashian, Midori Goto, Abel Selaocoe, and Vivian Hagner, and with leading performers of his generation, including Stella Chen, Randall Goosby, Stephen Waarts, Maria Ioudenitch, Geneva Lewis, Inmo Yang, Oliver Herbert, and Xavier Foley. 

In 2024 Orsen released his debut album, Wagner’s Nightmare, with pianist Pierre-Nicolas Colombat, with whom he previously recorded an LP of Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata. Wagner’s Nightmare is the culmination of a larger tongue-in-cheek retrospective on Richard Wagner. Every piece on the album is inspired by people, places, and things Wagner did not like, and features the rarely heard Viola Alta, a behemoth 19-inch viola Wagner specified for the performance of his operas at Bayreuth.

Increasingly productive as a writer, Orsen’s prose has appeared in The Strad, The Journal of the American Viola Society, The Anglican Way, and CREATED, and he has a sporadic Substack (mostly) reviewing CDs.

Orsen is active as a teacher with a thriving private studio in Saint Paul. He also teaches viola and chamber music at the Laurel School of Music, and in the summers is on faculty at Credo and the Northern Lights Chamber Music Institute. 

Daniel Orsen grew up in Pittsburgh, PA. He was taught and mentored by members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Credo, and the Perlman Music Program before his studies at the Oberlin Conservatory with Peter Slowik and the New England Conservatory with Kim Kashkashian. He plays on a 2013 Philip Injeian viola and a 2014 Benoit Rolland bow, both specially made for him.

For more information about Daniel, please visit his website.