Loan Cazal, viola

Loan Cazal is a French violist. In 2014, he was selected as solo viola in Yuri Bashmet’s youth orchestra and later played at the Musikverein in Vienna with him. In December 2014, he won the “Clos Vougeot” Foundation competition, which provided him with a “Gunter Siefert” viola with which he currently plays. In 2015, he won the first prize as well as the special prize of the international competition “Léopold Bellan”, then 16 years old. In March 2017, at the age of 19, Loan Cazal won the position of principal viola with the Württembergisches Kammerorchester in Heilbronn, which gave him the title of “Germany’s youngest principal viola”. This position played a decisive role in his career and led him to perform all over Germany, in large halls as well as in musically very famous cities (Munich, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Weimar etc….).

His taste for this position of conductor offers him many opportunities; he is then spotted by various prestigious orchestras and is regularly invited to replace as principal viola in orchestras such as the Staatskapelle Orchestra of Weimar, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Liège, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Brussels, the Opera “La Monnaie” of Brussels, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Luxemburg, the Niederbayerische Philarmonie of Passau and others… From 2019 to 2020 he is selected as principal viola with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Since July 2019, he has been teaching viola at the “Giovanni Virtuosi” academy alongside Maestro Igor Volochine (violin), David and Alexandre Castro-Balbi (violin and cello).

In September 2019, he founded the chamber orchestra “Libertalia” in the highlands of France with David Castro-Balbi and the conductor Nicolas Kruger. In 2019, he records with the Castro-Balbi brothers a chamber music disc for the CPO label in Cologne, with Schubert’s “Trout” quintet and Hummel’s quintet on the programme, which will be released in 2021.

In September 2021, he joined the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel as Artist in Residence