Anna Agafia & Sinfonia Varsovia - Nielsen & Szymanowski, Violin Concertos (2023)

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Anna Agafia & Sinfonia Varsovia - Nielsen & Szymanowski, Violin Concertos (2023)

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Some people have a clear idea of the career they want even from early childhood. Others prefer to go with the flow, making the most out of the present, with very little projection into the future. This might be because their present is sufficiently rewarding and fulfills everything their soul longs for, or it might also be for fear of disappointment after devoting themselves to a single project, because it might narrow down their horizon… or both options as once, as it happens to be for Anna Agafia! Indeed, today she is a fully dedicated violinist; nevertheless, she could just as easily have been a professional ice-skater, an actress or a philosopher. However, life decided otherwise, and some doors were harshly shut. This is the story of a young artist, at ease with who she is, and invigorated by the awareness of her fragility.

A musical cauldron

Her father, A Danish saxophone player, also at the head of a music school in Copenhagen. Her mother, a Ukrainian organist as well as a choir conductor. Two older brothers from her mother’s first marriage: one plays the clarinet as well as the organ while the other is a flautist and a transpsychedelic DJ. Her younger brother, a hip hop artist and producer who also plays the cello and studies art history at the Sorbonne University in Paris. In such a musical environment, how does one avoid the implacable predestination of a musician’s life? Well, by enjoying an almost normal childhood where music was always an option, but never an obligation! “Even if I can’t recall any precise memory, it was most probably my parents who chose the violin for me. My mother in particular, who epitomizes the authentic Slavic mother, was always present, taking me to my lessons, advising me at each crossroads, with expertise but also with lucidity and gentleness, accepting my second thoughts as well as my choices. Nowadays this is still very much the case – too bad if some people call her a hen mother.”

Slavic mother and young TV-star

Anna Agafia’s mother is at the crux of the violinist’s life story, and miles away from the caricatural tyrants so often found behind young virtuosos. When Anna was a little girl, her mother encouraged her passion for figure skating, a passion which had her training ten times a week, combining skating lessons, muscle training and ballet lessons. She was also by her side when, at the age of twelve, a chronic pain in the knee forced her to quit. Her mother was also behind Anna when she would steal the scene, both on stage and later on the big screen. At the age of seven, Anna appeared as Gretl in The Sound of Music for two seasons at the main musical theatre in Copenhagen. Then followed several feature films, in which she first embodied an eight-year-old sick child from the seventeenth century, and then, between the age of ten and sixteen, “the role of a life time” in a TV-series (later adapted to the big screen), where she was cast as the lead character’s neighbor and eventually girlfriend… It proved to be a very intense period in her life, where people would recognise her in the street; the violin was not totally put on hold, but she only managed to practice thoroughly during the weekends.