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Anna da Silva Chen has established a reputation as one of Australia’s finest and most versatile concert violinists. Born in 1996, she began violin studies at eight years old in her home city of Wollongong, making her solo debut with the South Coast Orchestra by the of age of eleven. She has since appeared as a soloist internationally and with major Australian orchestras including the Sydney, Adelaide, Queensland, Tasmanian and Canberra Symphony Orchestras among others, maintaining a great artistic curiosity for a wide variety of concertos.

 

Notably she has performed Elgar and Tchaikovsky concertos with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Last Night of the Proms concerts with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sibelius Concerto with several orchestras, Beethoven Concerto with Steel City Strings, Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1 with Ensemble Apex and West Phil, and Saint-Saëns Concerto No. 3 with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in 2011. International highlights include solo debuts in Germany with the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra at the invitation of Nicholas Milton AM and in prestigious concert halls across Spain performing Kuster’s “Two Jades” concerto with the SCM Symphony Orchestra, as well as performances of music ranging from J.S. Bach to Rudolf Escher at Orlando Festival, the oldest chamber music festival in the Netherlands.

 

An avid chamber musician, Anna is a founding violinist of the Alma Moodie Quartet, championing works of composers such as Ligeti, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. She tours regularly with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, cherishing recent performance opportunities in the US, Canada and Japan. She has also enjoyed long-standing collaborations with the Australia Piano Quartet as their only Artist in Residence, as guest violinist with Omega Ensemble, and as a soloist, director, and concertmaster with Ensemble Apex — a young Australian collective bringing classical music to diverse audiences. Anna has performed at the Canberra International Music Festival for consecutive years and will appear in the Sydney, Brycefield Estate and Tasmanian Chamber Music Festivals for the 2024 season. Anna is equally at home as a recitalist and has been privileged to play with leading pianists such as Daniel de Borah, Shuann Chai and Lee Dionne.

 

By the age of 15, Anna was winner of the Australian Kendall National Violin Competition, National Fine Music Young Virtuoso Award and National Youth Concerto Competition, semi-finalist in the 2012 Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition, and a frequent finalist of the ABC Young Performers Awards. She won a silver medal in the Vienna International Music Competition and multiple prizes in the Gisborne International Music Competition.

 

Anna joined Prof Mihaela Martin’s class at the Cologne University of Music and was one of ten students selected to study with Professor Boris Kuschnir at Kronberg Academy’s Violin Masterclasses. Her most influential chamber music teachers include Johannes Meissl and Eberhard Feltz with whom she studied in Austria and Italy. Anna holds a Bachelor's degree from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where she studied under Alice Waten on full scholarship and in the Open Academy Rising Stars program with Dr Robin Wilson. She was winner of the conservatorium’s concerto competition, several University of Sydney Academic Merit Prizes, the Corrina Taylor Memorial Prize and the Miss Ada Thompson Scholarship for Postgraduate Students.