Biography
Daniel Orsen is a member of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Prior to joining the SPCO, Daniel lived for six years in Boston, where he performed with A Far Cry, the BSO, Fermata Chamber Soloists, and the Phoenix Chamber Orchestra, and ran Jamaica Plain Chamber Music from 2019-2022. Additionally, he was Guest Solo Violist with the Arctic Philharmonic in Norway during the 2018-2019 season.
As soloist, Daniel has performed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Stamitz Viola Concerto with the Fermata Chamber Soloists, Vaughn William’s Christmas Suite with Pittsburgh Civic Orchestra, and Thea Musgrave’s Lamenting Ariadne with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble.
Chamber festival credits include Krzyzowa, Ravinia, Verbier, Prussia Cove, Oak Hill, and the Perlman Music Program, and he has performed chamber music alongside Itzhak Perlman, Kim Kashkashian, Eckart Runge, and the Jasper String Quartet.
Daniel is the co-creator, along with pianist Pierre-Nicolas Colombat, of Wagner’s Nightmare: a tongue-in-cheek retrospective on Richard Wagner’s life, work, and legacy. The culmination of Wagner’s Nightmare is the album, Wagner's Nightmare - every piece on the album is connected in someway to something or someone whom Wagner did not like. Wagner’s Nightmare is also notable as the first classical music album to be distributed as a “Limited Digital Album” (LDA). An LDA uses blockchain technology to create a finite number of tokens to gain access to an album, thus creating digital scarcity - something non-existent with streaming services and Youtube - which radically changes the potential for musicians to make money from their recordings.
Daniel is one half of the long-distance viola-piano duo, Wagner’s Nightmare, which occasionally roasts Richard Wagner. The duo’s eponymous album, Wagner’s Nightmare, releases April 19. The album is the culmination of a tongue-in-cheek retrospective on Wagner’s life, work, and legacy. Every piece on the album is connected in someway to something or someone whom Wagner did not like, and features the rarely heard Viola Alta, a massive 19-inch viola Wagner specified for use in his orchestra at Bayreuth.
Daniel has an interest in cultural and intellectual history which has manifested itself not only in Wagner’s Nightmare, but in essays published by The Strad, The Anglican Way, CREATED, The Journal of the American Viola Society, and a Substack (mostly) reviewing CDs.
Daniel is a native of 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.
Daniel practices the violistic hobby of creating silly arrangements and transcriptions for the instrument, the silliest and most notable being the Fledermaus Fantasy for viola and piano and a five-viola version of Weber’s Andante et Rondo Ungarese. When the case is closed, Daniel enjoys reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and doing the occasional counterpoint excercise.
April 2024