Melia Watras

Melia Watras has been hailed by Gramophone as “an artist of commanding and poetic personality” and by The Strad as “staggeringly virtuosic.” As a violist, composer and collaborative artist, she has sustained a distinguished career as a creator and facilitator of new music and art. In 2025, Watras will release her 10th album; she has performed on 13 others as violist of the Corigliano Quartet. Her compositions have been performed throughout the US and in Europe, broadcast on National Public Radio’s Performance Today, and can be found on the albums The almond tree duos, Kinetic, Partita Party, Play/Write; String Masks; 3 Songs for Bellows, Buttons and Keys; Firefly Songs; Schumann Resonances and 26. Watras’s adaptation of John Corigliano’s Fancy on a Bach Air for viola is published by G. Schirmer, Inc. and can be heard on her Viola Solo album. For twenty years, Watras concertized worldwide and recorded extensively as violist of the renowned Corigliano Quartet, which she co-founded. She is currently Professor of Viola and Chair of Strings at the University of Washington School of Music, where she holds the Ruth Sutton Waters Endowed Professorship. In 2024, the American Viola Society presented Watras with the Maurice W. Riley Award, for her distinguished contributions to the viola as a performer, composer, teacher and leader. Please visit www.meliawatras.com for more info.