Francisco Lima Santos
Violin
Born in Lisbon, he began his musical studies at the age of nine at the Fundação Musical dos Amigos das Crianças, under Ana Margarida Sanmarful. He finished his degree in violin at Lisbon Conservatory, where he studied with Khachatour Amirkhanian. He continued his studies at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Brussels, under Yuzuko Horigome, first prize winner in the Queen Elizabeth Music Competition. He finished his studies in 2016 at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid, where he was a student of Ana Chumachenko and Zograb Tatevosyan. During his studies, he took masterclasses by Mauricio Fuks, Liviu Prunaru, Antje Weithaas, Veronika Hagen, Heime Muller, Pavel Gomziakov, Francesca Vicari and Krzysztof Wegrzyn. He was a member and scholarship holder of the Orquestra Sinfónica Juvenil, of which he was a soloist, having also performed solo in various concert halls throughout Portugal. He has been a member of Orquestra XXI since its beginning. He was a member of the European Union Youth Orchestra, with whom he played in various important European venues.
He has won prizes in the violin category in various competitions during his studies, such as the Fundão International Competition, the José Augusto Alegria Prize and the Young Musicians Prize. In 2016, he won the Vasco Barbosa Prize and in that same year he performed solo with the Portuguese Symphony Orchestra at São Carlos National Theatre. He is a member of the Artium trio, the ensemble that won the Young Musicians Prize in 2016, in the Chamber Music category.
He has played with a number of orchestras in Europe, including the Euskadi Symphony, the Belgian National Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic. He has regularly performed in the Cantabile Festival in chamber music concerts alongside soloists such as Diemut Poppen, Ivan Monigetti, Christel Lee and Barnabas Kelemen. He has been 1st Auxiliary Soloist of the Gulbenkian Orchestra since 2017.