Univ.-Prof.
William Coleman
Award-winning violist William Coleman studied with Thomas Riebl and Kim Kashkashian, and in Budapest with the legendary pianist and pedagogue Ferenc Rados. He has been on the jury of the Tokyo, Tertis, and Geneva Competitions. He plays the “ex-Tertis” Carlo Antonio Testore viola of 1735. He is a Pirastro Artist.
Violist William Coleman enjoys a multifaceted career as a chamber musician, soloist, and violist of the prize-winning, trend-setting Berlin Kuss Quartet. He is passionately engaged in broadening and deepening connections across the arts, regularly commissioning new works.
He has performed at the Salzburg, Verbier, and Edinburgh Festivals, as well as in the Berlin Philharmonie, Vienna Musikverein, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and Carnegie Hall, New York. He also appears regularly at the Quartet’s series at the renowned Berlin techno venue, Watergate Club.
His chamber music partners have included Isabelle Faust, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Miklós Perényi, Clemens Hagen, Mischa Maisky, Kim Kashkashian, Adrian Brendel, and Leif Ove Andsnes. Regular collaborators also include Japanese dancer Yui Kawaguchi, Bill T. Jones, actors Nina Hoss and Udo Samel, and a long-standing personal working relationship with composers György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, and Harrison Birtwistle. A commitment to curating relevant programming and expanding the boundaries of concert life has inspired annual commissions of new works for the Kuss Quartet. Their most recent recording includes three such commissions, one of which features string quartet with artificial intelligence-based computer programming.
With the Kuss Quartet, he has recorded for Sony/BMG, Onyx, and ECM. In 2018, the group won an Opus Klassik award, and in 2020 released a new recording of the Weinberg Piano Quintet for Sony. That same year, under unique circumstances and followed by international media, the quartet released their recording of the complete Beethoven quartet cycle, *Live from Suntory Hall, Tokyo*, performed on the famed “Paganini Quartet” of Stradivari instruments, on loan from the Nippon Foundation.
He studied at the Mozarteum Salzburg with Thomas Riebl, and later with Kim Kashkashian at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He recently replaced Kashkashian at NEC, taking over her class for three months. For three years, he travelled regularly to the U.S. for masterclasses with Karen Tuttle, a formative figure in the viola world.
A landmark in his artistic development was his first masterclass as a young student at the International Musicians’ Seminar in Prussia Cove, Cornwall. Founded by the Hungarian pedagogue Sándor Végh, the seminar marked the beginning of many journeys to Budapest over the following decade to study with pianist and pedagogue Ferenc Rados. He has returned to Prussia Cove annually for the past twenty-five years as a senior artist. In 2022, he was also a senior artist at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont.
He is Professor and Chair of Viola at the Mozarteum University Salzburg and has given masterclasses at the Juilliard School in New York, the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin, the Suntory Hall Academy in Tokyo, and the Royal Academy of Music in London, and holds regular seminars at Stanford University in California.
He is also in demand internationally as a jury member, recently serving on juries for the International Tertis Competition (Isle of Man), the Tokyo International Viola Competition, and the Geneva International Music Competition.
William Coleman plays the “ex-Tertis” Carlo Antonio Testore of 1735 and is a Pirastro artist, performing exclusively on Evah Pirazzi Gold and Oliv strings.
He is married to dynamic American violinist, pedagogue, and orchestra director Meesun Hong Coleman, and they have two young daughters, Elodie and Tessa.