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About
CarlaMaria Rodrigues has been Principal Viola of the San Francisco Opera since 1996. She won her first audition at the age of 23 with the Minnesota Orchestra where she was later appointed Assistant Principal Viola. Serving as the Minnesota Orchestra’s Acting Principal in 1995, she was a featured soloist in Strauss’ Don Quixote with Yo Yo Ma and David Zinman, recorded live on MPR. Since moving to San Francisco, she became a frequent Guest Principal of the Australian Chamber Orchestra where she was later appointed Principal Viola until she left in 2004.
Chamber music activities have taken CarlaMaria throughout the world with such artists as Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Hepzibah Menuhin, Rudolph Serkin and Pinchas Zukerman. She has toured extensively to Europe, South America, Israel and Australia as a member of the Zukerman and Friends’ Ensemble and has been an active participant at numerous Festivals including Marlboro, Santa Fe, Gstaad, IMS Prussia Cove, Aldeburgh, Savannah, Sangat and Mecklenburg. In 2012, she traveled to Italy to work on a recording project of chamber music works by Koechlin and later that year collaborated with Menachem Pressler, Daniel Hope, Lorenza Borrani and the Emerson String Quartet at the Savannah Music Festival. In 2013 CarlaMaria performed the Loeffler songs with Anne Sofie von Otter at the Savannah Music Festival and later that summer was invited to play Principal Viola with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under the direction of Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Graz, Austria. In 2014 she performed with Anthony Marwood and Richard Lester at the Peasmarsh Festival and in November was invited to present a recital and Master Class at the 42nd International Viola Congress in Porto, Portugal where she performed with Lorenza Borrani and Simon Crawford-Phillips as a member of The Borrani Trio. In 2015 she was again invited to play Principal viola with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe on a tour of Italy under the direction of Andras Schiff and later that summer performed at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival and the Bristol Proms with Daniel Hope. In 2016, she performed with the Danish String Quartet and also performed the Sinfonia Concertante with Lorenza Borrani and L’Arte Del Mondo at the Savannah Music Festival. Later that summer she performed the Kegelstadt with Romie de Guise-Langlois and Ignat Solzhenitsyn at the Salt Bay Chamberfest recorded for later broadcast on Maine Public Radio. Upcoming engagements in 2017 include teaching at NYO-USA at SUNY-Purchase in NY, performing at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Lubeck, Germany.
CarlaMaria has become a much sought after teacher and is a regular guest teacher of the Jerusalem Music Center, coaching chamber music and orchestral studies to aspiring young musicians from all over Israel, including the Young Israeli Philharmonic. CarlaMaria has devoted much of her time to the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation in Bombay, mentoring teachers, instructing children and organizing educational programs to promote western classical music. She has been invited to coach an orchestral summer music program at the University of Indiana, and been invited to give a Masterclass at University of Michigan and has been a regular Guest Professor at the University of Sacramento. In 2016 she became the new Adjunct Professor of Viola at UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
A native of London, CarlaMaria entered the Yehudi Menuhin School at the age of ten. She studied both violin and viola and her instrumental and chamber music teachers included Robert Masters, Peter and Margaret Norris, Hans Keller, Felix Andrievsky, David Takeno and Nadia Boulanger. From an early age she appeared as both soloist and chamber musician in London’s major concert halls and has been heard on the BBC Radio and Television Network and Performance Today on American Public Media.