Anna da Silva Chen

Anna da Silva Chen is widely regarded as one of Australia’s leading concert violinists, known for her passion and virtuosity as a soloist, chamber musician, concertmaster and director. She co-leads the Alma Moodie Quartet and has been a permanent member of the Australian Chamber Orchestra since 2025.

As a soloist Anna has performed with many of Australia’s major orchestras including the Sydney, Adelaide, Queensland, Tasmanian and Canberra Symphony Orchestras as well as various regional, youth and community orchestras. Concerto highlights include Elgar with the ASO, Shostakovich No. 1 with Ensemble Apex and West Phil, Beethoven with CSO and Steel City Strings, Brahms with NSSO, the Butterfly Lovers’ with QSO, and Sibelius and Tchaikovsky concerti with several orchestras. In 2024, she performed the Australian premiere of Max Reger’s 1908 Violin Concerto with Concerto Arcana. Overseas, she made her German debut in 2020 with the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra, toured Spain as a soloist with the SCM Wind Symphony Orchestra, performed several concerts and tutored chamber ensembles in the Netherlands’ 2022 Orlando Festival, and lead a performance of Ligeti’s Melodien in Italy’s Chigiana International Festival 2024.

By the age of 15, Anna won Australia’s Kendall National Violin Competition (1st and Audience Choice prizes), the National Youth Concerto Competition, Fine Music FM’s Young Virtuoso Award, and was a semi-finalist in the Menuhin International Violin Competition. She went on to win the overall prize of KPO’s NSW Concerto Competition, the Sydney Conservatorium’s Concerto Competition, University of Sydney Academic Merit Prizes, the Corrina Taylor Memorial Prize and the Miss Ada Thompson Scholarship, and was a frequent finalist in the ABC Young Performers Awards. In recent years she was a laureate of the Vienna and Gisborne International Music Competitions and one of 22 violinists selected to compete in the Carl Nielsen International Competition.

Deeply motivated as a chamber musician and curator, Anna embraces complex and neglected works across many historical periods. As founding member of the Alma Moodie Quartet, she shares the dedication to the music their namesake championed — the classics as well as rarely played pieces by Schoenberg, Reger, Ligeti and Zemlinsky. She has performed as guest violinist with the Australia Ensemble, Omega Ensemble, Australia Piano Quartet, Ensemble Q, and Selby & Friends, as soloist, guest director, and concertmaster of Ensemble Apex, and as a festival artist in the Canberra International, Tasmanian, Brycefield Estate, and Newcastle Music Festivals. She has been privileged to perform alongside Richard Tognetti, Kristian Winther, Shunske Sato, Shuann Cai, Daniel de Borah and Lee Dionne.

Anna was born in Sydney and raised in Wollongong, beginning violin lessons at the age of 8 with Sarah Hindson. Anna maintains a strong connection to audiences on the South Coast and has continued to perform concerts at the Gerringong Music Club series almost every year since she was 11. She studied with Dr Robin Wilson in the Sydney Conservatorium’s Rising Stars program, as an undergraduate with Alice Waten, and lastly with Prof Mihaela Martin in Cologne, Germany. She has had memorable lessons with Eberhard Feltz (Conservatorio di Verona), Ilya Gringolts (Accademia Musicale Chigiana), Laurent Korcia, Johannes Meissl, Maxim Vengerov, Barnabás Kelemen, and Boris Kuschnir (Kronberg Academy).