USA | Violine
Alexander “Sasha” Yakub received a graduate diploma in violin performance in 2024 as the first student of Leila Josefowicz at the Mannes School of Music on a full scholarship, where he also completed his masters as a President’s Scholar under Miranda Cuckson in 2022. Sasha holds a bachelors in music from Harvard, where he received the 2020 Robert Levin Prize in Musical Performance and was a 2019 Harvard Office for the Arts Development Fellow. Sasha has performed in masterclasses for Irvine Arditti, Vadim Gluzman, Rachel Barton Pine and Jennifer Koh; he was also a 2022-2024 Akademist at the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, 2021 Bang On a Can Summer Festival Fellow, 2020 Yamaha Young Artists Competition honorable mention winner, and a 2017-18 Tanglewood Music Center Violin Fellow, during the second year of which he served as concertmaster for the 2018 Myrios recording of “In Seven Days” by Thomas Adès (Kirill Gerstein, soloist). The eponymous album—containing it—was the 2021 winner of the contemporary category in the International Classical Music Awards. In 2024, he won runner-up at the Mannes School of Music Concerto Competition for his performance of Adès’ Concentric Paths violin concerto.
With Forrest Eimold, Sasha is a proud member of Duo 404, a project devoted to the most challenging repertoire “within and without” 20th-/21st-century music. Previously they have studied in Adès’s class at Prussia Cove; in summer 2025 they will be appearing at the Ostrava New Music Days. Some of Sasha’s other notable public performances include the world premiere of Paul Mortilla’s violin concerto “Animal Brain: ad infinitum perplexus confixium” with New Music New Haven at the Yale School of Music, and the performance of “Synchronisms No. 9” at the Harvard Music Department’s memorial concert for Prof. Emeritus Mario Davidovsky. Sasha lives in New York, where he has contracted with Lincoln Center Stage and the American Composers Alliance.