Owen Dalby, Violin
Praised as "dazzling" (The New York Times), "expert and versatile" (The New Yorker), and "a fearless and inquisitive violinist" (San Francisco Classical Voice), Owen Dalby leads a rich musical life as a soloist, chamber musician, new and early music expert, orchestral concertmaster, and educator. As a member of the St Lawrence String Quartet since 2015, Owen lives in San Francisco and is artist-in-residence at Stanford University. With the SLSQ, recent and upcoming projects include tours of the major chamber series in North America and Europe, as well as solo debuts with the LA Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in John Adams’s Absolute Jest, a work for string quartet and orchestra written for the SLSQ.
Owen is a co-founder of Decoda, the affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall, and was also the concertmaster of Novus NY, the contemporary music orchestra of Trinity Wall Street. He made his Lincoln Center debut in 2010 with Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall, and that same year gave the world premiere of Look Around You, a one-man double concerto by Timo Andres for solo violin and viola, with the Albany Symphony Orchestra.
In 2010 he completed a three-year tenure in The Academy, a fellowship of Carnegie Hall and the Juilliard School that seeks to link a performer's life with advanced training in education and community engagement. In addition to co-directing the chamber music program and maintaining a violin studio at Stanford, Owen has taught music to students of the Choir Academy of Harlem, PS 14Q in Queens, and PS 112 in Brooklyn, and in masterclasses in Mexico, Iceland, at Princeton University, Skidmore College, and the University of South Carolina.
Owen is regularly invited to perform chamber music at festivals from Hamburg to Honolulu, and from Iceland to Mumbai. His many chamber music collaborators have included Daniel Hope, Christian Tetzlaff, Dawn Upshaw, the Persian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, and Simon Rattle.
Owen received early training with Anne Crowden at the Crowden School in Berkeley, California and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University.