WE ARE
Committed to Opera
WE BELIEVE
#MusicConnectsUs
WE KNOW
#WeWillMetAgain
Donate

Milan Milisavljević, Principal Viola

Milan Milisavljević is Principal Viola with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. His performances combine intense expression with an immediate and profound link to his listeners and have won much critical acclaim.

The Strad magazine has described his playing as “very imaginative, with a fine, cultured tone.” Milan’s solo album Sonata-Song, released by Delos Music, has received glowing reviews, with the recording of Aram Khachaturian’s solo sonata on the album hailed as “definitive”. He has won prizes at competitions such as Lionel Tertis and Aspen Lower Strings and has performed at Marlboro, Cascade Head, Classical Tahoe, Mostly Mozart, Agassiz and Grand Teton music festivals. Milan has appeared as soloist throughout the world, with orchestras such as the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonic orchestras of Belgrade, Medellín, and Boca del Río, Aspen Sinfonia, New York Classical Players, Classical Tahoe, and others. As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with members of the Guarneri and Mendelssohn String Quartets, as well as Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Joseph Kalichstein, Augustin Hadelich, Cho-Liang Lin and many others.
 
Milan has been heard worldwide on countless recordings and broadcasts of the MET. He previously served as its Assistant Principal Viola for eleven seasons. He is a former member of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and has served as guest Principal Viola of many orchestras, such as the Toronto Symphony.

Deeply committed to education, Milan is on the viola faculty of the Mannes School of Music as well as New York University. He has given classes at universities and conservatories worldwide, such as at the Juilliard School and the Rubin Academy of Music, as well as at Verbier Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Interlochen Center for the Arts and as a volunteer at Ecole de musique St-Trinite in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He is also increasingly in demand as a conductor, serving on the conducting faculty of the Manhattan School of Music Precollege Division as head of one of its orchestras.

 
Deeply committed to music of today, Milan has given the world premiere of Afro-Cuban composer Leo Brouwer’s Solo Viola Sonata, and regularly performs new music by Ana Sokolovic, Jessie Montgomery and others.
Milan’s teachers include Jutta Puchhammer, Atar Arad, James Dunham, Nobuko Imai and Samuel Rhodes. He plays on instruments and bows made by Stephan Von Baehr, Pierre Simon and Jean-Pascal Nehr and is a Larsen Strings Artist.