Viola – ex Quatuor Ysaÿe
(France)
Miguel da Silva began his studies at an early age at the Conservatoire National de Région de Reims, his home town. He then entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, where he studied with Serge Collot. There he won the First Prize for chamber music and the First Prize for viola, the latter unanimously with a special jury vote.
In 1985, he won the First Grand Prize at the Paris International Chamber Music Competition in sonata formation, and joined the Paris Opera Orchestra.
Miguel da Silva has been passionate about the string quartet since he was a teenager. He left the Paris Opéra in 1987 and founded the Ysaÿe Quartet with three friends. He left for Cologne to work with the Amadeus Quartet.
Numerous international competitions (Portsmouth, Evian), for which the quartet won First Prizes, paved the way for an international career for the Ysaÿe Quartet in Japan and the United States (Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum in New York), as well as in Israel and Europe (Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, Wigmore Hall in London, Berlin, and at the Lockenhaus, Stresa and Salzburg festivals). This brilliant career came to an end at the beginning of 2014, when the quartet ceased its activity, its members each pursuing their own individual careers.
Miguel da Silva’s chamber music partners include Michel Portal, Jean-Claude Pennetier, Paul Meyer, Leonidas Kavakos, Pierre Amoyal, Nikita Boriso-Glebsky, Antonio Meneses, Augustin Dumay, Henri Demarquette, Truls Mork, Gary Hoffmann, Pascal Rogé, Emmanuel Pahud, Jean-François Heisser, Christophe Coin…
Miguel da Silva has also been guest soloist with the Paris Chamber Orchestra, the Polish Chamber Orchestra, the Auvergne Chamber Orchestra, the Franz Liszt Orchestra of Budapest, the Sinfonia Varsovia, the Montpellier Orchestra and the Pamplona Orchestra, under the baton of conductors such as Peter Csaba, Jean-Jacques Kantorow, Arie van Beck and François Xavier Roth.
At the same time, the educational imperative became obvious to him. In 1993, at the Conservatoire National de Région de Paris (now the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional), Miguel da Silva led his friends in the Ysaÿe Quartet in the creation of a specific string quartet class: a first in France. Their students from France (Ébène, Modigliani, Voce, Hermès) and abroad (Aviv from Israel, Incanto from Switzerland, Différence from Latvia) have won most of the international string quartet competitions.
As well as teaching the quartet class at the CRR, which is now his main responsibility, Miguel da Silva runs advanced classes at the Villecroze Academy, Aldeburgh, the Maurice Ravel Academy in Saint Jean de Luz, Banff (Canada), Savonnlina (Finland) and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
He is artistic advisor to the Académie musicale de Villecroze.
In September 2009 – after teaching viola and chamber music for two seasons at the Hochschule Lübeck, succeeding Walter Levine – he was appointed professor of viola at the Haute École de Musique de Genève and teaches regularly with the ECMA (European Chamber Music Association) and the Summer Academy of the Vienna University of Music (ISA).
Miguel da Silva is Master in Residence at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth in Belgium, alongside baritone José van Dam, violinist Augustin Dumay, pianist Louis Lortie, cellist Gary Hoffman and the Artemis Quartet.
