Mélanie Clapiès, violin

Born in Paris, Mélanie Clapiès is a violinist who cultivates a unique solo and chamber music career worldwide. A versatile and fluid artist, her collaborators have included musicians such as Anthony Marwood, Roger Tapping, and John Myerscough, Pavel Vernikov, Vladimir Mendelssohn, Victor Julien-Laferrière, Adam Laloum, and Guillaume Vincent. In 2012, she founded the annual chamber music festival “En attendant…” in Burgundy, France, with cellist Yan Levionnois. Together, they recorded an album of duos for violin and cello (Pierrots Lunaires, Fondamenta/Sony, 2104) as a part of her ongoing interest in exploring and uplifting unusual repertoire.  Named a Zonta Club laureate in 2001, she has also received the Broadus Erle Prize (2013), the Yale School of Music Alumni Association Prize (2014), and the Philip Francis Nelson Prize from Yale University (2015). Mélanie Clapiès studied at the Conservatoires Nationaux Supérieurs de Musique in both Lyon and Paris. A passionate educator, she has been on faculty at the Conservatories in Toulon and Bordeaux as well as the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. In 2014 and 2015, she received her M.M. and A.D. from the Yale School of Music where she studied with Syoko Aki. A resident of San Francisco, Clapiès splits her time between performing concerts, composing, and writing fiction.