viola
Alexandra Urquhart was born in 1981. She began studying the viola at the age of 15. She obtained her degree at Trinity College of Music where she was awarded the Band/Kurtz Viola Prize and the Guivier String Prize. Alexandra then acquired her postgraduate diploma at the Royal College of Music supported by the St Marylebone Educational Foundation, studying with Simon Rowland-Jones. Her other teachers have included Vicci Wardman, Richard Crabtree and Rivka Golani.
She was a member of Southbank Sinfonia in 2005, with whom she played as principal, and performed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in Anghiari in Tuscany. Since then, she has performed extensively as a chamber musician, including performing the Mendelssohn Octet with the Chilingirian Quartet, and in Aldeburgh with the Kerem String Quartet as the Britten-Pears Young Artists Quartet in Residence for 2005.
She has enjoyed playing with several of the UK’s leading orchestras, such as the Philharmonia, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom she is currently undergoing a trial. In 2008 she went to Santiago, Chile, to play for a year with their Philharmonic Orchestra, travel in South America and learn Spanish. Since returning to the UK in 2009, Alexandra has branched out into the jazz and tango scene, with tours and performances as part of the Sigamos Quartet with the saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, the London Tango Orchestra, and Tango Siempre. She will also feature on the latter’s upcoming album, Malandras del Tango.
Alexandra plays on a 2002 viola by David Milward.