Francisco Fullana, violin

A native of Mallorca in the Balearic Islands of Spain, Francisco is making a name for himself as both a performer and a leader of innovative educational institutions. A recipient of the 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant, he has performed as soloist with orchestras such as the Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Spanish Radio Television Orchestra, Argentina’s National Orchestra, Venezuela’s Teresa Carreño Orchestra, and numerous U.S. ensembles including the Saint Paul and Philadelphia Chamber Orchestras, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Vancouver, Pacific, Alabama, and Maryland Symphony Orchestras. He has worked with such noted conductors as the late Sir Colin Davis, Gustavo Dudamel, Alondra de la Parra, Christoph Poppen, Jeannette Sorrell, and Joshua Weilerstein. 

This past May, Orchid Classics released Francisco’s new album, Bach’s Long Shadow, an exploration of Bach’s Partitas and their influence over the solo violin genre for the past three centuries. Fullana’s love for the sound of gut strings has also blossomed into an artistic partnership with the Grammy Award winning baroque ensemble Apollo’s Fire, both in performance and in the recording of Spanish and Italian baroque music. 

Active as a chamber musician, Francisco is a performing member of The Bowers Program at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln. Francisco is also a committed innovator, leading new institutions of musical education for young people. He is a co-founder of San Antonio’s Classical Music Summer Institute, where he currently serves as Chamber Music Director. He also created the Fortissimo Youth Initiative, a series of music seminars and performances with youth orchestras, which aims to explore and deepen young musicians’ understanding of 18th-century music. 

Francisco performs on the 1735 “Mary Portman” ex-Kreisler Guarneri del Gesù violin, kindly on loan from Clement and Karen Arrison through the Stradivari Society of Chicago.