Chair sponsored by Alenka Tindale.
Anna da Silva Chen has been a member of the Australian Chamber Orchestra since 2024.
Anna da Silva Chen is widely regarded as one of Australia’s leading young violinists, known for her brilliance and virtuosity as a concerto soloist, chamber musician, recitalist and director.
As a soloist, Anna has performed with most of Australia’s major orchestras including the Sydney, Adelaide, Queensland, Tasmanian and Canberra Symphony Orchestras as well as many regional, youth and community orchestras. Concerto highlights include Elgar with the ASO, Shostakovich No. 1 with Ensemble Apex and West Phil, Beethoven with SCS, Brahms with NSSO, the Butterfly Lovers with QSO, and Sibelius and Tchaikovsky concerti with several orchestras. More recently, she performed the Australian premiere of Max Reger’s 1908 Violin Concerto with Concerto Arcana.
Further afield, Anna 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.
Deeply motivated as a chamber musician and curator of independent projects, Anna embraces complex and neglected works across all historical periods. As founding member of the Alma Moodie Quartet, she shares the dedication to the music their namesake championed, from the classics to rarely played quartets 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 and Newcastle Music Festivals. She has also been privileged to perform alongside Richard Tognetti, Kristian Winther, Andrew Haveron, Julian Smiles, Shuann Cai, Daniel de Borah and Lee Dionne.
By the age of 15, Anna was winner of 1st and Audience Choice prizes in Australia’s Kendall National Violin Competition, the National Youth Concerto Competition, Fine Music FM’s Young Virtuoso Award, and semi-finalist in the Menuhin International Violin Competition. She was a frequent finalist in the ABC Young Performers Awards and has twice been nominated for the Freedman Fellowship Awards. In recent years, she was one of 22 violinists selected to compete in the Carl Nielsen International Competition.
Born in Sydney to Chinese and Portuguese parents, Anna has Australian and European citizenship. She grew up in Wollongong and began violin lessons at the age of 8 with Sarah Hindson, later studying at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with Dr Robin Wilson in the Rising Stars program and as an undergraduate with Alice Waten. She has had lessons abroad with Ilya Gringolts (Accademia Musicale Chigiana), Eberhard Feltz, Johannes Meissl, Maxim Vengerov, Barnabás Kelemen, Arabella Steinbacher and Boris Kuschnir (Kronberg Academy). In 2019, Anna moved to Germany for a Masters degree with Prof Mihaela Martin, however, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted her return to Australia. She is currently on probation for a tenured position in the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Anna performs on an 18th-century violin made in the style of Pietro Guarneri of Venice, kindly on loan from Jannie Brown.
Interview with ACO violinists Anna da Silva Chen & Tim Yu
“Nothing beats playing music with others.”
