During the Cape Symphony’s 2019/20 season, to discover a truly creative artist who would perform with the Cape Symphony in May 2020, we held a competition via video auditions to make it easy for anyone from anywhere to enter. The positive response to our competition was overwhelming! We received over 60 high-quality applications from across the United States and all over the world, including Iceland, Russia, and Peru. The winner of the Cape Symphony International Violin Competition was extraordinary young violinist Clarissa Bevilacqua. Our plans for May 2020 didn’t work out, so we’re thrilled to have Clarissa join us in September 2022!
Clarissa is known to enchant audiences with her dazzling technical skills and deeply inspiring musicality. Music director and conductor Terry Lowry says she has that “rare star quality that is difficult to describe, but impossible to miss.” Clarissa debuted at the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago in front of ten thousand people when she was nine years old. Since then, she has performed solo recitals and concerto engagements at venues throughout North America and Europe.
Winner of several international competitions, Clarissa was awarded First Prize, Audience Award and Special Bärenreiter Award at the International Mozart Competition Salzburg. She is a Young Artist of the Classically Connected Organization in New York and an Affiliate Artist of the Guarneri Hall Program in Chicago.
An avid and enthusiastic learner, Clarissa received her Bachelor of Music at age sixteen, graduating summa cum laude. In 2021, she completed her Master’s of Music in violin performance at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, where she studied with Pierre Amoyal. She is currently studying with Antje Weithaas at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" in Berlin.
Clarissa’s debut album will be released by Nimbus Records, featuring Augusta Read Thomas’s complete works for solo violin, and Violin Concerto #3: "Juggler in Paradise" with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Clarissa is passionate about historic violins, and at age fourteen, she was selected as the youngest violinist to perform regularly with the precious Stradivari collection of the Violin Museum in Cremona. She now performs on a violin by Zosimo Bergonzi, Cremona c.1748, courtesy of Guarneri Hall NFP and Darnton & Hersh Fine Violins, Chicago.
To learn more about Clarissa, visit her website.
Clarissa Bevilacqua joins the Cape Symphony for Mozartiana on Saturday, September 17 & Sunday, September 18, 2022. For more information and to purchase tickets for Mozartiana, visit capesymphony.org, call the Box Office at 508-362-1111, email
