Bio

Hailed by The Strad as ‘an artist who risks’ and described by Pizzicato Magazine as ‘a sensitive artist who knows how to immerse in the depths of music’, her passion for promoting the viola combined with her charismatic and expressive performances, and her beauty of sound, make Isabel Villanueva one of the most valued and complete violists of today.

Since her debut at 18 performing Bartók Viola Concerto with the Radio Television Spanish Symphony Orchestra, Ms. Villanueva has developed an global career that has expanded through Europe, Russia, China, Latinamerica and Middle East. In 2013 she made history becoming the first foreign violist to perform recitals in Iran. Passionate, energic and creative, she is embarqued in an overflowing activity as a soloist, pedagogue,  creator of innovative projects to expand classical music, premiering contemporary works, and playing chamber music projects with prestigious colleagues.

She has been invited as a soloist with important orchestras including Moscow Soloists, Estonia National Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar in Venezuela, Real Philharmonia de Galicia, Castile and Leon Symphony Orchestra, Lebanon Philharmonic, Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra, New Russia State Symphony Orchestra and Zagreb Soloists, among many others, under the baton of Michel Plasson, Jacek Kaspszyk, Yaron Traub, Paul Daniel, Andres Mustonen, Jorge Mester, Christian  Vásquez and Lior Shambadal.

Isabel Villanueva © Rosalía Bronstein

Tour

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17/12/2020

20:30h

Recital con Antonio Galera (piano)

ÚBEDA (ES)

Festival de Música y Danza Ciudad de Úbeda (Auditorio Hospital de Santiago)

Beethoven Noturno op.42 para viola y piano

Beethoven Sonata op.69 No.3 para viola y piano

News

RITUAL, Isabel Villanueva’s new album for viola solo has been released on 23.3.23, available in physical format under the label Viola Power and on all digital platforms.

In her second album she presents a sound meditation that invites us to connect with our inner silence through music. A journey of sound that starts from the enigmatic first notes of the ‘Ode to Wisdom’ by Hildegard von Bingen, the abbess of the Middle Ages, to the last passages of the ‘Parade’ from the ‘Sonatas del Rosario’ by the baroque master Heinrich Ignaz Biber. Meanwhile, the selected miniatures of the cycle ‘Games, Signs and Messages’ of the current Hungarian referent György Kurtág, and at the heart of that hypnotic itinerary, one of the capital works of the most universal repertoire, the ‘Partita n.º 2, BWV 1004’, where the paradigmatic Ciacona by Johann Sebastian Bach is inserted. Defying time and space, Villanueva configures a concert program in an organic way, putting together a circular format without a solution of continuity that connects authors from different eras, styles and contexts.

RITUAL, ‘Exceptional Album of the Month’ May 2023, Scherzo Magazine “Daring and risk are two recurring elements in Villanueva’s projects, and Ritual is no exception (…) Villanueva offers a stylistically impeccable interpretation without strictly adhering to historicist dictates, a reading always attentive to the organic development of the form as if music were in itself a metaphor for life, the journey of a sound seed that germinates, grows, expands and reaches its culmination and death, which is but a return to the seed.” 

Music