The Brazilian violist Rafael Altino studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston, going on to earn a master’s degree at the Juilliard School in New York. Among his teachers are Burton Fine, Walter Trampler, Louis Krasner and Samuel Rhodes. Altino is principal viola of the Odense Symphony Orchestra, with which he has performed works of Bartók, Walton, Hindemith, Paganini and Strauss, as well as premièring three new concertos written for him by Karsten Fundal, Christian Lindberg and Søren Nils Eichberg.
In addition to his orchestral work, Rafael Altino is sought-after as a chamber musician. A former member of the Danish Arild String Quartet, he has performed with the Miró and Paizo String Quartets and musicians such as Antônio Meneses, Nikolaj Znaider, Claudio Bohórquez and Roland Pöntinen. He has a passion for new music: the Danish composers Poul Ruders, Bent Sørensen, Anders Koppel and Nils Rosing-Schow, as well as the Brazilian composers Danilo Guanais, Nelson Almeida, Marcilio Onofre and Henrique Vaz, have all written solo pieces for him.
Rafael Altino teaches viola and chamber music at the Danish National Academy of Music in Odense and the Malmö Academy of Music. He plays on an anonymous French viola from the late 1700s and with a James Tubbs bow, generously on loan by the Odense Symphony Orchestra’s Instrumentfonden.
