Brittany MacWilliams
Brittany MacWilliams has a rich and diverse career both as performer and educator. She made her professional violin debut at age ten with the Louisville Orchestra and went on to win numerous competitions including the Music Teachers National Association competition. Since then, Ms. MacWilliams has performed extensively as soloist and concertmaster in such diverse locales as Istanbul, Beijing, Salzburg, Munich, Lisbon, and New York. She has had solo engagements with such orchestras as the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Louisville Orchestra, Munich Hochshule Orchestra, Kentucky Symphony, and Aspen Chamber Symphony. Ms. MacWilliams can be heard as soloist on two critically acclaimed compact discs of Giornovichi Violin Concerti for the Arte Nova Classics/BMG label.
Ms. MacWilliams is a passionate educator and has an active and varied teaching background. She has been a professor of violin and viola at the University of Louisville School of Music for fourteen years. She has also been the Director of the UofL String Academy, a program for talented and dedicated pre-college students, and founder and director of the Oldham County Chamber Ensemble, for ten years. Under her direction, the UofL String Academy was awarded a $240,000 grant from the prestigious Dorothy Richard Starling Foundation, providing scholarships for deserving young musicians.
She has taught at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music as a member of the violin faculty for eleven years and was a member of the string faculty at Xavier University, where she taught violin, viola, and chamber music for six years. She has been a member of the string faculty at Campbellsville University and at the Oldham County Schools Arts Center. She was also the director and a member of the violin faculty of the Starling Preparatory String Project at the University of Cincinnati for twelve years.
During the summers, Ms. MacWilliams has served on the faculties of the Aspen Music Festival and the Great Wall International Music Academy in Beijing, and she currently teaches at the Sewanee Summer Music Festival, where she has been a member of the artist faculty for nine years.
As a frequent recitalist and avid chamber musician, Ms. MacWilliams performs in duos, piano trios, and string quartets throughout the United States. She is a founding member of the Baur Quartet and the Xavier Trio and has recorded four compact discs for the Vital Sounds label, including the Ten Celebrated String Quartets of W.A. Mozart. She can also be heard on “Passion from the Romantic Era,” a CD featuring Brahms’ Violin and Piano Sonatas. She was chosen as resident artist for the Next Generation Music Festival where she toured and performed with pianist Awadagin Pratt.