Javier Zafra
Musician
Born in Alicante, he entered the Conservatorio Superior de Música Oscar Esplá, where he studied harmony, bassoon and counterpoint. He moved to the Netherlands in 1996 to study historical bassoon. He studied bassoon and chamber music with Donna Agrell and Ku Ebbinge at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, and music theory with Peter van Heyghen.
Javier Zafra graduated with honors as a baroque bassoonist in June 2000. He was a member of the European Union Baroque Orchestra (EUBO) in 1997, then under the direction of Ton Koopman. Since then he has performed with the ensembles Anima Aeterna, Orchestre des Champs Elysées, Le Concert d'Astrée, Al Ayre Español, and with conductors such as Philippe Herreweghe, Trevor Pinnock, Gustav Leonhard, René Jacobs and Sir Simon Rattle. His main interest is chamber music, he has played with Lorenzo Coppola (Ensemble Dialoghi), Kristian Bezuidenhout, Alexander Melnikov or Isabelle Faust, with whom he has recorded the Schubert Octet. He has successfully performed Mozart's Bassoon Concerto KV. 191 at the prestigious KKL Luzern, at the Wigmore Hall in London or at the Lincoln Center in New York which was acclaimed by the New York Times in the Mostly Mozart Festival 2010.
Javier Zafra has been a member of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra since 1999. From 2012 to 2017, he taught baroque bassoon at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg. As of September 2018, he teaches baroque bassoon at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Brussels.
