Violinist - bio
Currently based in Cologne, the Catalan violinist Sara Cubarsi has been featured as a soloist, chamber musician and composer in the United States and Europe. This past June 2018, Sara completed her doctoral studies at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles) with a full scholarship from LaCaixa and the Michael Skloff Scholarship, where she taught composition and other core curriculum classes. Her violin repertoire covers a wide array of styles and instruments, from early music on baroque violin to black metal on electric violin, with a special focus on modern violin and (experimental) microtonal composition. As a performer-composer she is concerned with the connection between tuning and matter, and her work presents interdisciplinary assemblages that often combine slow just intonation sonorities with interactive wax paintings made by herself. Her past main violin teachers include Andrew McIntosh, Mark Menzies, Tomotadah Soh, Remus Azoitei, Carmel Kaine, Eva Panyella, Luis Garcia Ampudia, Montse Ciurans and Albert Sàrries; but her musical family and friends have always been her ultimate mentors.
She is a founding member and associate composer of ensemble x.y, and currently performs with the European Union Baroque Orchestra. Sara has been a member of the Berwick Academy for period instruments 2017, Lucerne Festival Academy 2015, European Union Youth Orchestra and has toured with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra Academy 2013. As a soloist, Sara gave the Spanish première of Philip Glass' Violin Concerto n.2 with the National Chamber Orchestra of Andorra in 2015, and is prizewinner of the "El Primer Palau 2013" competition in Spain, the Prize of the Radio Channel Catalunya Música, and the Beare Bow Prize 2013 from the Royal Academy of Music, among others. Other performance features include WasteLAnd, Microfest (LA), HASS Fest (Yerevan), Darmstadt Music Festival, Eaton Square Concert Series (London), Atlantic Music Festival (Maine), and La Pedrera (Barcelona).
Sara was a scholarship student at the Royal Academy of Music in London on the Master of Music in Research and Performance program with a grant from the Catalan government (OSIC). She was an undergraduate at the Royal Academy of Music and previously studied at the Purcell School of Music with the "Music and Dance Excellence" scholarship from the UK government.
With many other things on her plate, Sara is currently studying early music with Sirkka-Liisa Kaakinen-Pilch at the Music Academy in Kraków, and this coming year 2019 Sara will start working with Ensemble Musikfabrik.
Sara plays on a modern violin by David Bagué and a baroque violin by Michael Fischer.