MUSE • Musicians United for Social Equity

Violinist Evelyn Estava has earned recognition as one of the top performing artists in her native Venezuela. She has made many guest soloist appearances with orchestras in North and South America, including the Mexico State Symphony, the Simón Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Falcón. Recent performances have included the World Premiere of the Rhapsody from themes by Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town”, by Charlie Harmon, Bernstein’s former assistant and orchestrator. She has twice been featured in cover articles for Violinist.com, the leading website for string players.

Apart from her busy solo, orchestra, and quartet performing schedule, Ms. Estava has also distinguished herself as a chamber music coach and violin clinician. She serves on the faculty of the Killington Music Festival, and has taught Master Classes across the United States and Venezuela.

Ms. Estava performs regularly with the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, the Allentown Symphony, and the NJ Festival Orchestra. She currently serves as concertmaster of the Plainfield Symphony and the Somerset Symphony, and is the first violinist of the Madison String Quartet. With this group, she has toured Austria and Germany recently, and released two CDs, “Life is a Dream/Music of the Americas”, and Duos and Quartets for Strings by David Rimelis. Last year, she released a CD featuring the violin duos by Mazas, which she recorded with her husband, violinist/ violist/conductor Michael Avagliano. As winner of the Artists International Special Presentation Award, Ms. Estava made her New York debut in 2005 at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.

At age 15, Ms Estava became a member of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, the crowning jewel of that country’s celebrated music education program “El Sistema”. With this orchestra she toured Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Later she won the Associate Concertmaster position in the Orquesta Filarmónica Nacional, where she was also the first violinist of that orchestra’s string sextet. Ms. Estava completed her musical studies at the Simón Bolívar Conservatory in Caracas, where she was a student of Ramón Román and José Francisco Del Castillo. She has studied chamber music with Josef Gingold, Philip Setzer, Lawrence Dutton and Arnold Steinhardt, and performed for six years at the Killington Music Festival, where she was a scholarship student and assistant of Margaret Pardee. She has also played in Master Classes for Augustin Dumay, Olivier Charlier, Ruggiero Ricci, Eugene Fodor, Neil Weintrob, Massimo Paris, and Henryk Szeryng, and has made further studies in New York with Joey Corpus, and in Vienna with Stefan Kamilarov, Alexander Steinberger, and Pavel Vernikov.