Miguel da Silva, viola

Franco-Swiss musician, Miguel da Silva was born in Reims in 1961. He started studying at the Conservatoire of his native city before moving to Paris where he was a student at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique with Serge Collot.
He was awarded first prize in chamber music and also for viola (unanimously with special vote by the jury).
In 1985 he won the First Prize of the International chamber music competition in Paris (sonata).

His passion for string quartet led him to found the Ysaÿe Quartet with 3 of his friends. The Ysaÿe Quartet has then studied with the Amadeus String Quartet. After winning the first prizes in Evian, the members of the Ysaÿe Quartet soon started an international career that led them throughout the world, from Japan to America. This brilliant thirty-year career was brought to an end in January 2014, after a major series of concerts, with a special emphasis on the music of Beethoven.

In the past few years, engagements either as a solo player or with his quartet have led him to the Wigmore Hall in London and most of the greatest concert halls in Europe (Munich/Herkulesaal, Venice/Teatro della Fenice, Copenhague, Helsinki, Amsterdam/Concertgebouw, Hannover, Basel, Baden-Baden, Salzburg/Festspielhaus, Leipzig ) and he has toured in Belgium, USA, Japan, and Italy.

Miguel da Silva has appeared as a soloist with the Paris Chamber Orchestra, the Polish Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre d’Auvergne, the Franz-Liszt orchestra of Budapest, the Orchestra de Bretagne, and the Orchestre “Les Siecles”. As a very sought for chamber music player, his partners are Michel Portal, Jean-Claude Pennetier, Paul Meyer, Leonidas Kavakos, Pierre Amoyal, Augustin Dumay, Nikita Boriso-Glebksy, Antonio Meneses, Jean-François Heisser, Truls Mork, Henri Demarquette, Gary Hoffmann, Emmanuel Pahud, Christophe Coin…

Parallelly to his Cds with the Ysaÿe Quartet, Miguel da Silva has recorded under the labels Accord, Valois-Auvidis, Philips, Harmonia Mundi etc… He also founded his own record company: Ysaÿe Records, and under the label Nascor, offers young musicians the opportunity to make their very first recording.

In 1994, he started a class of string quartets (premiere in France !) and has since then been teaching a whole new generation of French and European quartets and chamber music groups at the Conservatoire National de Région in Paris. In 2008, he was appointed as a professor in Luebeck’s Musikhochschule (Germany)- where he took over Walter Levine’s position, as a tutor at the European Chamber Music Academy (ECMA) and for Vienna Music University’s Summer Academy (ISA). In 2009, he joined Geneva’s Haute Ecole de Musique (Switzerland) as a viola and chamber music teacher and became the artistic director of Villecroze’ Académie musicale (France).

He is a Master in Residence in the viola and chamber music section at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Belgium, where he joins Gary Hoffman (cello), Corina Belcea (chamber music), Jean-Claude Vanden Eyden (chamber music), Frank Braley (piano), Avedis Kouyoumdjian (piano), Augustin Dumay (violin), Jose van Dam (barytone), Sophie Koch (mezzo-soprano).