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 became a student of Serge Collot at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. There he was awarded with the first prize in chamber music and viola. In 1985 he won the first prize in the International Chamber Music Competition in Paris.

His passion for string quartet led him to found the Ysaÿe Quartet with three of his friends. The Ysaÿe Quartet has then studied with the Amadeus Quartet. After winning the first prize in Evian Competition, 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 greatest concert halls of the world, such as; London/Wigmore Hall, Munich/Herkulessaal, Venice/Teatro della Fenice, Copenhague, Helsinki, Amsterdam/Concertgebouw, Hannover, Basel, Baden-Baden, Salzburg/Festspielhaus, Leipzig and he has toured also in Belgium, USA, Japan and Italy.

Miguel da Silva has appeared as a soloist with the Paris Chamber Orchestra, the Polish Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre d’Auvergne, Ferenc Liszt Orchestra of Budapest, Orchestre de Bretagne, and Orchestre “Les Siecles”. As a very sought chamber music player, his partners include the names such as; 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 among others.

Parallelly to his CDs with the Ysaÿe Quartet, Mr. da Silva has recorded under the labels Accord, Valois-Auvidis, Philips, Harmonia Mundi among others. He also founded his own recording company “Ysaÿe Records” and he offers young musicians the opportunity to make their very first recordings under the label “Nascor”.

In 1994, he founded the first string quartet class and since then, he has been teaching to new generation string quartets and also other chamber music groups at the Conservatoire National à Rayonnement Régional de Paris. In 2008, he was appointed as a professor in Musik Hochschule Lübeck, where he took over Walter Levine’s position and he started to teach at the European Chamber Music Academy (ECMA) and Vienna Music University’s Summer Academy (ISA) as a tutor. Moreover in 2009, he joined Haute Ecole de Musique de Geneve as a viola and chamber music professor and also became the artistic director of Académie musicale de Villecroze (France).

Miguel da Silva is currently master in residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Belgium.