Christian Colberg

Christian Colberg is a violist born in Puerto Rico and currently the Principal Viola of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

I learned about Christian from Joel Dallow’s The Cello Sherpa Podcast in the episode titled The Accidental Violist and dated May 30, 2025. Christian has a lively personality, and in the podcast episode he tells several funny stories, including how he, as a violinist with three weeks of experience playing the viola, passed an audition with the Baltimore Symphony for a violist position.

Christian has written Audition Manifesto: A Guide to Taking Orchestral Auditions; the PDF file is downloadable for no charge from a link on the home page of his website. An unusual piece of advice is that during an audition the musician must not deviate from the finished product created in the practice room. Christian devotes a great deal of space to this idea.

Christian has released two albums, Talking to Myself (2022), and baylamoose (2024). Christian writes about these two albums on About the Albums on his website.

In the podcast episode with Joel Dallow, Christian talks about how he has been writing down musical ideas for many years, and he finally got around to recording them, playing all of the instruments himself (except flute by Amy Taylor) and doing all the production work. The results are very good and interesting; the style of composition and the creativity are similar in some ways to music created by Mike Block, only on viola instead of cello.

Christian also has his own YouTube channel, which includes the performance of a recent composition, Concertaunt.