Suzanne Casey – violin

Violinist and Festival Artist Suzanne Casey studied as a young musician at the Hereford Cathedral School, and while there was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, and was also involved in the Three Choirs Festival. After leaving school she attended London’s Royal Academy of Music, where she received the Waley Violin Prize, and the McEwen String Quartet Award. She was also selected as a member of the European Union Youth Orchestra. After completing her studies at the Academy, she was awarded the prestigious Starling violin Scholarship to study at Indiana University, where she received the Performer’s Diploma.
Upon graduation from Indiana she was invited to join Michael Tilson Thomas’s national training orchestra for young musicians, the New World Symphony, and spent the following two years performing with that orchestra in Florida and San Fransisco. In 2000, she moved back to Britain to take up a position in the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and enjoys a busy musical life with the orchestra as well as playing chamber music with friends and colleagues. She was a co-founder of BBC NOW’s chamber music series at St David’s Hall (the national concert hall of Wales) and has appeared on many of the UK’s most prestigious chamber music series’ and festival stages. She has also played with The Hallé, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the Swan, English Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra. She appears regularly as a soloist with orchestras in the UK and USA with a broad repertoire, ranging from repertoire mainstays by Beethoven and Mendelssohn to rarities like the Shostakovich Second Violin Concerto and Mendelssohn’s youthful Concerto for Violin and Strings. In recent years Suzanne, with her husband Kenneth Woods, has run an ongoing series of chamber music concerts at their home in Wales.
Suzanne plays on a fine violin by the 19th Century Italian master Eugenio Degani