Elicia Silverstein – viool

2020 BBC Music Magazine Award-winning violinist Elicia Silverstein is rapidly garnering praise on the international stage for her nuanced, bold and insightful performances of repertoire ranging from the 17th to the 21st century. Silverstein is equally at home as performer on historical and modern instruments, as a soloist with orchestra, giving recitals and playing chamber music. Her “elegant… wonderfully inventive” playing (The Strad) and her “highly emotionally intelligent” (Gramophone) approach to music making distinguish Silverstein as one of the most important musical voices of her generation. 

Silverstein made her London recital debut in 2015 with a sold out concert at the Spitalfields Music Summer Festival. Subsequently, she was featured as a soloist in the 21st Ambronay European Baroque Academy tour, performing the Telemann Concerto for Three Violins with Enrico Onofri and British-Italian violinist Mayah Kadish in Italy, France, Slovenia and Portugal. Since then, Silverstein has appeared as a soloist with ensembles including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with whom she performed as one of the two viola d’amore soloist on their 2016 St. John Passion Tour, Barokkanerne (Norway), Ensemble Odyssee (Netherlands), Cathedra Camerata (US), Tesserae Baroque (US), the Steinitz Bach Players (UK), and Ensemble Paulus Barokk (Norway). She has also collaborated with Accademia Bizantina (Italy), B’Rock (Belgium), the Handel and Haydn Society (USA), and Les Inventions (France). Silverstein has performed as a soloist at venues including the Washington National Cathedral, where she was Artist-in-Residence for the 2019-2020 concert season, the Muziekgebouw Aan’t Ij, the Berlin Konzerthaus, the Teatro Massimo di Palermo (Italy), the Teatro Comunale di Bologna (Italy), and Kings College Chapel (UK). Her solo recitals have been presented by the Barbican’s Baroque at the Edge festival (UK), the Wonderfeel Festival (Netherlands), the Larvik Barokk Festival (Norway), the Brighton Early Music Festival (UK), Capella Cracoviensis’Musica Poetica Festival (Poland), the Festival Internacional de Música de Espinho (Portugal), Bologna Modern (Italy) and many others. She has been featured on RAI Radio3 Suite’s program La stanza della musica (Italy), WQXR’s Young Artist Showcase (USA), and BBC Radio 3’s In Tune.

Silverstein has performed chamber music with artists including Mauro Valli and Michele Pasotti (with whom, in 2016, she founded the ensemble Harmonical Miscellany), Richard Egarr, Alexandra Nepomnyaschaya, Robert Levin, Ani Kavafian, Paul Coletti, Naruhiko Kawaguchi and members of the Ebène Quartet.

Silverstein’s first solo album, “The Dreams & Fables I Fashion” was released by Rubicon Classics to international critical acclaim in October 2018.  The album features repertoire spanning 300 years by Biber, Sciarrino, Pandolfi-Mealli, Berio and Bach.

Born in New York City, Silverstein began playing the violin at the age of two. From age six, she studied with Ecaterina Gerson and then Louise Behrend at the School For Strings, later continuing her studies the Juilliard School’s Pre-College Division first with Louise Behrend, and ultimately with Curtis Macomber. She earned her Bachelor of Music degree at The Colburn School’s Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, where she was a student of Robert Lipsett and Arnold Steinhardt and was selected to perform as a soloist with the Colburn Orchestra on numerous occasions. Silverstein moved to Europe in 2013 when she was awarded a Netherlands-America Foundation Fulbright grant to study connections between avant-garde twentieth century Italian music and seventeenth-century stylus phantasticus music, under the supervision of Vera Beths, Anner Bylsma and Lucy van Dael at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, where she completed her Master of Music degree in 2015 with the highest honours. Silverstein plays on a Jean- Baptiste Vuillaume violin crafted in Paris in 1856, copy of a Guarnerius del Gesu, and on bows made by René-William Groppe, Ralph Ashmead, and Gerhard Landwehr. In 2019, Silverstein joined the faculty of the University of Delaware School of Music, where she teaches violin, chamber and historical performances. She is also the founder and artistic director of the Brisighella Summer Music Academy and, in october 2020 launched, together with music director Federico Cortese, a historical perfrmance program in collaboration with the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras – the first of its kind amongst American youth orchestra organizations. Silverstein divides her time between Italy and the USA.

Website: www.eliciasilverstein.com