Leila Núñez-Fredell

Leila Núñez-Fredell is a violinist based in Los Angeles, and a member of the award-winning Royce String Quartet. She also regularly plays with the DuselForty58 Chamber Ensemble and the critically acclaimed Pacific Opera Project. A dedicated chamber musician, Ms. Núñez-Fredell has performed on concert series such as UCLA Live at Royce Hall, Casa Classic, Concerts at One, and Sundays Live at LACMA. Regional and international engagements include performing with artists such as David Krakauer, John Cale, and the Borromeo String Quartet at the Italian festival Incontri in Terra di Siena.

With the Royce String Quartet, Ms. Núñez-Fredell won the 2013 San Diego MTAC Chamber Competition and the 2013 Ladies Musical Club of Seattle (founded 1891) Small Ensemble Competition. As winners of the Ladies Musical Club the Royce Quartet performed in Seattle and was featured in an hour-long live broadcast on Seattle’s classical music station KING-FM 98.1 Northwest Focus. The Royce Quartet’s engagements also include recitals in Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills, and San Clemente. Other recent performance highlights have included the finals of the 68th Annual Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition (2014), Sundays Live at LACMA, and a concert with Naumburg Competition winner Robert Davidovici.

Ms. Núñez-Fredell was the winner of SUNY Purchase’s 2009 concerto competition, playing Sibelius violin concerto, and UCLA Philharmonia’s “All-Star” competition, playing the Brahms violin concerto. At SUNY Purchase she performed the concertmaster solos for Scheherazade. Ms. Núñez-Fredell serves as concertmaster of the Grassroots Chamber Orchestra in Ithaca, NY, and played the Khachaturian violin concerto with that orchestra in 2011 and Beethoven’s Romance in F in 2014.

Ms. Núñez-Fredell received the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. She studied violin with Movses Pogossian and Guillaume Sutre at UCLA. Other past teachers include Laurie Smukler, Timothy Ying, and Susan Waterbury; chamber coaches include Antonio Lysy, Richard O’Neill, Calvin Wiersma, Ira Weller, and the Ying and Colorado quartets. She has also received coaching and participated in master classes by Arnold Steinhardt (Guarneri Quartet), Lynn Harrell, Stephen Arzberger (Leipzig Quartet), Gilbert Kalish (SUNY Stony Brook), Luc-Marie Aguera (Ysaÿe Quartet), and Fred Sherry (Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society). Ms. Núñez-Fredell was a founding member of the Zephyrus Piano Quartet while at the Eastman School of Music, which received the school’s Celentano Award for Excellence in Chamber Music.

A recipient of UCLA’s prestigious Dissertation Year Fellowship, Ms. Núñez-Fredell’s dissertation focused on the exchange between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical androids and human virtuosi: “Performing the Mechanical: Industrialism, Androids, and the Virtuoso Instrumentalist.” Ms. Núñez-Fredell has taught an undergraduate music history survey course as a lecturer at UCLA. She is also a faculty member at the Colburn School’s Music Academy, teaching and overseeing the music history curriculum. Among her lecture/performances Ms. Núñez-Fredell performed Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy, and presented on its extended techniques and use of the violin, as part of a lecture by Fred Sherry and also at an academic conference. A faculty member at SOL-LA Music Academy, Ms. Núñez-Fredell maintains a studio of private violin students.