Sarita Kwok
Australian violinist Sarita Kwok has been featured on stages in Australia, New Zealand, England, Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Israel, Japan and the United States and has performed as a soloist with the major symphony orchestras in her home country. After being named the James Fairfax Sydney Symphony Orchestra Young Artist she made her debut with the Sydney Symphony at fifteen and went on to win Australia’s most prestigious musical award: ‘The Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year (Strings)’ shortly after. She has been awarded prizes at the Kloster Schöntal International Violin Competition, Germany, Gisborne International Music Competition, New Zealand, and an Honorary Diploma at the 7th Wieniawski and Lipinski International Competition, Poland.
As a founding member and first violinist of the Alianza String Quartet, Ms Kwok has given debut performances at the Pacific Music festival, Japan, Aldeburgh festival, UK, Aix-en-Provence festival, France, and the French Academy in Rome. The Alianza quartet is the Grand Prize winner of the Plowman Chamber Music Competition 2007 and the First Prize winner of the Chamber Music Foundation of New England International Chamber Music Ensemble Competition 2008. From 2006 to 2008 the ASQ were in residence at the Yale School of Music and were closely mentored by the Tokyo String Quartet. In October 2007, the Alianza quartet made their Carnegie Hall. The New York Times reported that “the Alianza players are musical, well trained and have an unusually elegant sound – they boil over with an edge-of-the-seat eagerness” and praised Ms. Kwok as a “fine young violinist”. With the ASQ, Ms. Kwok has been featured on concert series at the Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music, NY, Danbury Concert Association, CT, Cosmos Club, Washington DC, Horowitz Piano series, CT, Redbank Chamber Music Series, NJ, to name a few, and on the international stages of Carnegie Hall’s Weill and Zankel recital halls, Merkin Concert Hall and Juilliard’s Paul Recital Hall in NY, Sapporo’s Kitara Hall and the Hakodate Arts Hall, Japan, the Villa Medici, Rome, and the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, Aix-en- Provence, France.
As a soloist and collaborator, Ms. Kwok has been featured throughout the United States on series such as the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Thayer Academy Winter Series, Hebron Academy and Temple Emanuel Chamber Series, Hammond Performing Arts Series and on WGBH public radio with pianist, Jian Liu, and her husband, cellist, Alexandre Lecarme. This season she performed on the Concert des Lauréats de l’Académie de Lausanne, Switzerland and was nationally broadcast by Suisse Romande radio. Ms. Kwok has performed in concert with Pinchas Zukerman, Amanda Forsyth, Boris Berman and members of the Tokyo String Quartet and has worked in master-classes with the late Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Midori, Pierre Amoyal, Bruno Canino and members of the Takacs, Guarneri and Julliard String Quartets. This season, Ms. Kwok joined the musician’s roster of Swiss Global Artistic Foundation.
Passionate about new music, Ms. Kwok has debuted works by Ezra Laderman, Jerome Combier and worked closely with Martin Bresnick and Michael Jarrell. The Alianza Quartet’s recording for Albany records of the three last quartets of Ezra Laderman has just been released. Ms. Kwok is also sought after as an educator, having given master-classes and pre-concert talks at the Rockport Festival, Hammond Performing Arts series, Wellesley College, and contemporary music workshop at Central Connecticut State University. Recently, she completed a series of solo recordings on instruments in the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments.
Ms. Kwok received both the Doctoral and Masters of Musical Arts degrees from the Yale School of Music as a student of Syoko Aki. She currently serves on the faculty of the Yale Department of Music and is the Coordinator for the Undergraduate Lessons Program at the Yale School of Music. Ms. Kwok performs on a violin by J.F. Guidantus made in 1736.