Franco-Swiss musician Miguel da Silva was born in Reims in 1961. He started studying at the Conservatoire of his native city before moving to Paris, where he was a student at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique with Serge Collot. He was awarded first prize in chamber music and also for viola (unanimously, with a special vote by the jury). In 1985, he won the first prize of the International Chamber Music Competition in Paris (Sonata).

His passion for the string quartet led him to found the Ysaÿe Quartet with three of his friends. The Ysaÿe Quartet then studied with the Amadeus String Quartet. After winning first prizes in Evian, the members of the Ysaÿe Quartet soon started an international career that took them throughout the world, from Japan to America. This brilliant thirty-year career came to an end in January 2014, after a major series of concerts with a special emphasis on the music of Beethoven. In recent years, engagements either as a solo player or with his quartet have led him to the Wigmore Hall in London and most of the greatest concert halls in Europe. He has toured in Belgium, the USA, Japan, and Italy.

Miguel da Silva has appeared as a soloist with the Paris Chamber Orchestra, the Polish Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre d’Auvergne, the Franz Liszt Orchestra of Budapest, the Orchestra de Bretagne, and the Orchestre “Les Siècles”. As a highly sought-after chamber music player, his partners include Michel Portal, Jean-Claude Pennetier, Paul Meyer, Leonidas Kavakos, Pierre Amoyal, Augustin Dumay, Nikita Boriso-Glebsky, Antonio Meneses, Jean-François Heisser, Truls Mørk, Henri Demarquette, Gary Hoffman, Emmanuel Pahud, and Christophe Coin.

In addition to his recordings with the Ysaÿe Quartet, Miguel da Silva has recorded under the labels Accord, Valois-Auvidis, Philips, Harmonia Mundi, etc. He also founded his own record company, Ysaÿe Records, and under the label Nascor, offers young musicians the opportunity to make their first recording.

In 1994, he started a class of string quartets (a first in France!) and has since been teaching a whole new generation of French and European quartets and chamber music groups at the Conservatoire National de Région in Paris. In 2008, he was appointed as a professor at Luebeck’s Musikhochschule (Germany), where he took over Walter Levine’s position, as a tutor at the European Chamber Music Academy (ECMA), and at Vienna Music University’s Summer Academy (ISA). In 2009, he joined Geneva’s Haute Ecole de Musique (Switzerland) as a viola and chamber music teacher and became the artistic director of Villecroze’s Académie Musicale (France).

He is the Master in Residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Belgium, where he joins José van Dam (baritone), Augustin Dumay (violin), Louis Lortie (piano), Gary Hoffman (cello), and the Artemis Quartet.