A two-time prizewinner in the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, Grand Prize winner in the 2015 Lewisville Lake Symphony International String Competition, winner of the 2017 Sousa/ABA/Ostwald Composition Award, and winner of Cuarteto Jose White’s 2018 “Nuestra America” Award, Dr. Christopher Lowry has won awards in numerous national and international performance competitions as well as composition contests such as the ATSSB Composition Competition, Dallas Winds Fanfare Contest, The American Prize in Composition, World Projects Composition Competition, Salford International Composers Contest, NAfME Composition Competition, Anton Stadler International Basset Clarinet Composition Competition, and Calls for Scores for the “Vox Novus” West Point Band Bicentennial, Cypress Symphonic Band, Brazosport Symphony, Joliet Symphony, Oklahoma Youth Winds, Alabama Symphony, BandWidth Music Festival, and Ablaze Records Orchestral Masters Series, among others. His music has been performed in such venues as Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Hall, Chicago Symphony Hall, Schermerhorn Symphony Center, and the Ryman Auditorium by ensembles such as the Nashville Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Baton Rouge Symphony, West Point Band, and Central Band of the Royal Air Force, among many others.
Dr. Lowry maintains a busy performing schedule throughout the United States and Mexico; he is a member of the faculty of the Festival Internacional de Musica Naolinco, and he is an occasional guest violist with the Carlos Chavez String Quartet in Mexico City. He recently led a consortium of 20 violists to commission the first major Mexican viola concerto by Eduardo Gamboa, which he will premiere with the Orquesta Sinfónica Sinaloa de las Artes in 2022; in addition, he has appeared as soloist with the Lewisville Lake Symphony, Baton Rouge Symphony, Acadiana Symphony, Louisiana Sinfonietta, University of Maine Symphony Orchestra, Vanderbilt University Orchestra, and Eastern Music Festival Orchestra, among others. Lowry is currently principal violist of the Amarillo, Baton Rouge, and Acadiana Symphony Orchestras, violist of the Lagniappe Trio, and an in-demand session musician in Nashville.
Dr. Lowry’s self-engineered and -produced debut solo CD, Milestones: New Music for Viola from the Third Millennium, released April 2021 on Centaur Records. He can also be heard playing the music of Dinos Constantinides on Magni Publications.
