Ásdís Valdimarsdóttir

Ásdís Valdimarsdóttir comes from Reykjavík, Iceland. Her musical education took her to the Juilliard School in New York, and later to Germany. Her most influential teachers were Paul Doktor,

Nobuko Imai, Felix Galimir and the Juilliard Quartet. She is now based in Amsterdam and has enjoyed a varied career, mostly as a chamber musician, and has been invited to many prestigious

festivals around the world, including Marlboro, Prussia Cove and Kuhmo to name a few. Ásdís has been a member of several prestiguous ensembles, most notably as principal viola of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie in Germany and the violist of the Miami, Chilingirian and Utrecht string quartets. She has made numerous CD and radio recordings with the above mentioned ensembles.

More recently she has made several cd’s for Zefir records in the Netherlands. Her double cd with the title ‘The Voice of the Viola in times of oppression’ with the pianist Marcel Worms was chosen

as CD of the year 2019 and given a 10 by the Dutch music magazine Luister. They include works by some less well known Jewish composers and some better known great masters such as

Shostakovich, Weinberg and Mendelsohn. With the Brunsvik String Trio, she recorded the complete String Trios of Beethoven for the composer’s 250th anniversary. Her most recent CD recording came out in February 2022 and has the title ‘Stolen Schubert’, with her own transcriptions for viola of works by Schubert; the Arpeggione Sonata, Hirt Auf dem Felsen, Auf dem Stom and songs from the Winterreise. It is recorded with gut strings on the viola and an Erard piano from 1851, with the pianist Edward Janning and the soprano Katharine Dain.

Ásdís Valdimarsdóttir has previously been on the faculty of the Trinity College and the Royal College of Music in London and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. She currently

teaches viola and chamber music at the Royal Conservatory The Hague. Since 2015 she has been a member of the Association of Body Mapping Educators. Body Mapping is a method for

preventing physical injuries in musicians that grew out of the Alexander Technique and is an integral part of her teaching.

A new edition of her arrangement for viola of the Fantasies for Gamba by G.F. Telemann will be published by the French publisher Billaudot in 2022.