Javier Zafra

Bassoon

Javier Zafra was born in Alicante (Spain) in 1975. After graduating in modern bassoon, harmony theory and counterpoint in his home town, he moved to the Netherlands in 1996, where he became interested in early music. He attended the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, where he studied baroque bassoon and chamber music with Donna Agrell and Ku Ebbinge, and music theory and history with Peter van Heyghen. Javier Zafra obtained his baroque bassoon diploma with distinction in June 2000.

He was selected as a member of the European Union Baroque Orchestra (EUBO) in 1997, then conducted by Ton Koopman.

Since then, he has performed as principal bassoon with some of Europe’s finest ensembles, including Anima Aeterna, Orchestre des Champs Elysées, Concerto Vocale, Le Cercle de l’Harmonie, Concert d’Astrée, Al Ayre Español and Orquesta Barroca de Sevilla, Capella Cracoviensis (Jan Tomasz Adamus, with whom he performed and recorded Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto in 2016), Concert de La Loge (Julien Chauvin, with whom he often performs as soloist) and the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble, among others.

He has worked with conductors such as Thomas Helgenbrock, Jos Van Immerseel, Philippe Herreweghe, Trevor Pinnock, Gustav Leonhardt, René Jacobs, Pablo Heras-Casado, Jérémie Rohrer, Ivor Bolton, Emmanuelle Haïm and Sir Simon Rattle.

His main interest is chamber music: he played for many years with Nachtmusique (Eric Hoeprich). He often plays with Lorenzo Coppola (Ensemble Dialoghi, with whom he recorded the quintets for piano and winds by Mozart and Beethoven (Harmonia Mundi France, 2017)), Kristian Bezuidenhout, Alexander Melnikov and Isabelle Faust, with whom he recorded Schubert’s Octet and Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat on period instruments (Harmonia Mundi France; 2018 and 2020).

As a soloist, he has performed in major venues such as the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg festival, the prestigious KKL Luzern, London’s Wigmore Hall and New York’s Lincoln Center, where his Mozart bassoon concerto was acclaimed by the New York Times as part of the 2010 Mostly Mozart festival.

Javier Zafra has been principal bassoon of the Freiburger Barokorchester since 1999.

Since 2016, he has been principal bassoon with the Ensemble Pygmalion conducted by Raphaël Pichon in Paris, where he lives with his family.

From 2004 to 2021, he taught every September at the Baden-Württembergische Ensemble-Akademie Freiburg.

From 2012 to 2017, he taught baroque bassoon at the Musikhochschule Freiburg. Since September 2018, he has been teaching baroque bassoon at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Brussels.