Olivia Scheepers, violin
Fiona Robertson, violin
Fiona is based in the Netherlands, where she performs with a variety of ensembles. She studied with Ilya Grubert and Maria Milstein at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and with Jan Repko at the Royal College of Music, London. She has performed at venues and festivals throughout the UK and the Netherlands, including the Wigmore Hall, St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, the Royal Albert Hall and Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ.
Fiona has appeared as soloist with the Glasgow Chamber Orchestra, the Scottish Festival Orchestra and Chetham’s Symphony Orchestra, performing the Sibelius, Berg and Bruch concertos. Recent engagements have included recitals at the Muziekkamer in Zaandam and the Papageno Huis in Laren with pianist Jaap Kooi. She regularly performs with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Het Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest Het Residentie Orkest, Shapeshift Ensemble, Nescio Ensemble and Philharmonia Amsterdam. She is a member of the Camus Trio and the Belinfante Quartet.
Fiona has a special interest in contemporary music and has performed works by Louis Andriessen, Maxim Shalygin, Salvatore Sciarrino, Edith Canat de Chizy and Boris Bezemer. In 2014 she recorded a set of solo violin pieces called ‘SPOTS’ by the Italian composer, Simone Fontanelli and in 2015, she was the winner of the inaugural Contemporary Music Competition at the Royal College of Music.
Sophie Vroegop, viola
Sophie started taking violin lessons with Anneke Schilt at the Muziekschool Amstelveen at the age of 5 and later went on to study with Hans Scheepers. The school provided the possibility to enhance her orchestral and chamber music skills from a very young age which resulted in her being part of an active quartet from the age of 8, sparking her love and devotion for chamber music.
When she graduated from high school, her wide spectrum of interests led her to study history and archeology at St. Andrews University, Scotland. As a four-time winner of the university’s classical music scholarship, she was able to continue her musical education there with W. Baxter (violin) and F. Hetherington (viola).
Subsequently she studied viola at The Hague Conservatory from 2012-2019, where she whole-heartedly enjoyed her time with professor Mikhail Zemtsov.
Alongside playing with the Belinfante Quartet, she regularly performs duets both original and arranged with Marnix Verberne.
She is also, together with Kasper Stern, the initiator of the Nescio Ensemble, with whom she organises concert tours both in the Netherlands and abroad. The themed concerts, with a combination of chamber music, string orchestral repertoire and collaborations with artists from different fields, take place in a variety of locations ranging from concert halls and venues to hospitals, schools and refugee centres.
Sophie has participated in masterclasses with a.o. Gregor Sigl, Tiberius Quartet, Fitzwilliam Quartet, Isabelle van Keulen, Alexander Zemtsov, Julia Dinerstein, Garth Knox.
Pau Marquès i Oleo, ‘cello
Pau was born in 1991 in Menorca, Balearic Islands.
Driven by his passion for chamber music, he is a member of two long-running ensembles; the Camus Trio and the Belinfante Quartet, with which he performs regularly both in The Netherlands and abroad, in concert halls such as Kleine Zaal Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Muziekgebouw Frits Philipps, Tiberius Festival in Targu Mures – Romania, and Festival de música d’estiu in Ciutadella de Menorca – Spain. He has also been broadcast on Opium Muziek – Radio 4.
Pau is also a member of the Chamber Music Orchestra of Menorca (OCIM) and the Kunsthalle for Music; a project for contemporary music, improvisation and artistic performance. It was set up at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam in 2018 and will travel on to several art centers such as KW Istitute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, in 2020. During the Kunsthalle for Music, he had the opportunity to work with such artists as Dominique González-Foerster, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, Jonathan Bepler and Ari Benjamin Meyers. The project has been reviewed by the New York Times.
Moreover he likes to collaborate with artists from other disciplines such as actor Brecht Hermans in the project The Karamazovs (Winner of the “Spirit of the Fringe” award during the Paris Fringe Festival 2018) and the dance company “The Kitchen” in Noise; a dance piece for which he has composed and performed live music.
Together with visual artist Jordi J. Cárdenas Lozano and the Belinfante Quartet, he initiated and designed the project Tchk- Tsjech! which shows live art projections alongside music by L. Janacek and was awarded the Delft Chamber Music Festival Prize at the Delft Fringe Festival 2019.
During his Bachelor’s degree, Pau studied with Amparo Lacruz and chamber music with Arnau Tomàs (Casals Quartet) at the Liceu Conservatory in Barcelona, where he graduated in 2013. In 2018 Pau obtained his Master’s diploma at the HKU Utrecht Conservatory, where he studied with the prestigious cellist Timora Rosler on a scholarschip from the Pedro i Pons Foundation.
With his unequivocal love for story telling he wrote ‘A Method towards creating Stories from a Narrative Understanding of Classical Music’ for his Master Artistic Research. During his masters degree he discovered his passion for Baroque and Renaissance music and started his viola da gamba studies with Joshua Cheatham.
Pau has participated in masterclasses with Gary Hoffman, Melissa Phelps, Dimitri Ferschtman, Asier Polo, Damián Martínez, Viola de Hoog, Oliver Wille, Casals Quartet, Utrecht String Quartet, Artemis Quartet, Quatuor Diotima and Jerusalem Quartet.