Danielle Wiebe Burke, viola

An artist whose playing has been hailed as “highly idiomatic, richly varied,” Mexican-Canadian violist Danielle Wiebe Burke’s work as a performer and educator has been recognized since she made her debut with the Calgary Civic Symphony at the age of sixteen. 

She was a prizewinning finalist at the 15th Annual Sphinx Competition and, recently, a quarter-finalist in the Primrose International Viola Competition. Her recordings have garnered international attention, with Gramophone’s review of her premier of Hannah Lash’s “Requiem” (Naxos) describing her playing as emerging “as beautifully as the singers sing.” 

As soloist, Danielle has performed in halls throughout Europe and the United States, including Zipper Hall (Colburn), Warner Music Hall (Oberlin), Woolsey Hall (Yale), and Severance Hall in Detroit. She may be heard regularly in the Belvedere Series, Staunton Music Festival, Appalachian Chamber Music Festival, and Wintergreen Music Festival. An accomplished orchestral musician, she has appeared in Boston’s Phoenix Orchestra, the Richmond Symphony, and the Williamsburg Symphony, where she holds the John C. Jamison Principal Viola Chair.

An avid explorer of new musical forms and of the interstates that link the classical tradition to popular idioms, Danielle has premiered the work of contemporary composers such as Michael Gilbertson, Ethan Braun, and Polina Nazaykinskaya. In other contexts, she has performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk with Faye Webster and on World Café with regular collaborators, the minimalist folk duo Lowland Hum.

A student of Kim Kashkashian at the New England Conservator and Ettore Causa at Yale University, where she received her doctorate, Danielle enjoys bringing music to young artists. She has performed Bach in the botanical gardens at Cornell, toured the “lost” composer Gaspar Cassadó’s string quartets to Oberlin, Ohio State, and Yale, and, with theorist Craig Wright, assembled an introduction to music that is now available to students across the world through Yale Open Courses. She presently teaches violin and viola at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Danielle plays a 2009 Stefan Greiner viola commissioned by violinist Kyung Wha Chung. She lives on a historic farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia