Louise Lansdown was appointed Head of Strings at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2012, after holding the position of Senior Lecturer in the School of Strings at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester from 2001-2012. Louise is the founder of the Cecil Aronowitz International Viola Competition and Festival https://www.bcu.ac.uk/conservatoire/events-calendar/cecil-aronowitz-viola-competition , launched at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in October 2014 as well as the founder and President of the British Viola Society https://www.britishviolasociety.co.uk/
She is on the council of the European String Teachers Association, Quartet of Peace Trust, Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, the Albion Quartet and directs the Conservatoire based viola course at Pro Corda, Suffolk.
Louise, along with her viola students is the founder of a major distance learning education project that the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire runs in collaboration with the Morris Isaacson Centre for Music in Soweto, South Africa called “ARCO”. The project was launched in July 2015 and was nominated for a guardian internationalization award in 2018 and a BASA22 Award in 2019 (Business and Arts South Africa). http://www.bcu.ac.uk/conservatoire/about-us/arco
She plays on a French Viola c.1750 and 1890 Sartory bow, both previously belonging to the South African violist Cecil Aronowitz. She has recently also acquired a 2018 Antoine Gourdon viola. Louise plays mostly chamber music and solo concerts, collaborating with violists and other musicians across the world. She commissions new music for the viola and concocts hair brain schemes to perform music by Paul Hindemith and much unknown viola music, bringing the viola to many unsuspecting and innocent people. She is a member of the South African “Ubuntu Ensemble”.
Louise hails from Cape Town where she studied with the late Prof Jack De Wet and Eric Rycroft at the University of Stellenbosch. She was awarded an ABRSM Overseas Scholarship for postgraduate study at the Royal Northern College of Music in 1998, where she then worked until 2012. Louise was awarded a PhD from the University of Manchester in 2008.
