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, the City Halls in Glasgow, the Concertgebouw and Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ.
Fiona has appeared as soloist with the Glasgow Chamber Orchestra, the Scottish Festival Orchestra and Chetham’s Symphony Orchestra. Recent engagements have included recitals at Classic Music Live! in Falkirk, the Younger Hall at St. Andrews University, the Muziekkamer in Zaandam and the Papageno Huis in Laren.
With a special interest in contemporary music, Fiona 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 Simone Fontanelli and in 2015, she was the winner of the inaugural Contemporary Music Competition at the Royal College of Music. She has performed with a number of new music ensembles including the Nieuw Ensemble and Shapeshift Ensemble.
Fiona has appeared in masterclasses with Alina Ibragimova, Christoph Richter, Pavel Fischer and members of the Jerusalem, Kuss, Alban Berg, Chilingirian, Ysaye and Smith quartets.
Sophie Vroegop, viola
Sophie studied with Mikhail Zemtsov at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague where she graduated with Bachelors and Masters degrees. In addition to this she has a MA degree in Ancient History and Archaeology from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. During her time there she studied violin and viola with Feargus Hetherington and was the recipient of the Sawyer Prize for Music and the winner of the St. Andrews Concerto Competition, resulting in a performance of the Bruch Romance with the University Chamber Orchestra. She has performed at venues and festivals across Europe including the Concertgebouw and the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam, the Tiberius Festival in Romania and the Grachtenfestival. She has performed live on Radio NPO 4 and on Dutch National television.
As co-founder of the Nescio Ensemble, Sophie has organised concert tours in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland. The Nescio Ensemble seeks to push the boundaries of
traditional concert settings by performing outside of concert halls and creating crossover projects with other art forms. Sophie also holds a position as a viola teacher at the Muziekschool in Amstelveen.
Sophie has won several prizes in the Netherlands, including the Prix d’honneur at Princess Christina Concours and the Entrée Chamber Music Competition in Concertgebouw, and has appeared in masterclasses with Mikhail Kugel, Alexander Zemtsov, Isabelle van Keulen and Garth Knox. She plays on a viola made by Daniel Royé in 2018, with the generous support of Stichting Eigen Muziekinstrument.
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 the Kleine Zaal of the Concertgebouw in 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 the NPO Radio 4 programme ‘Opium Muziek’.
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 Institute 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 was subsequently reviewed by the New York Times.
In addition to this, 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 Leoš Janáček 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 scholarship 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 Master’s 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, the Casals Quartet, the Utrecht String Quartet, the Artemis Quartet, Quatuor Diotima and the Jerusalem Quartet.