Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Richard Assayas began his violin studies at age 7 and graduated with honors from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Liege, Belgium. As a winner of various awards and competitions, he performed on several occasions as soloist with the Liege symphony Orchestra, notably in Brahms’ Violin Concerto. After further studies at the Juilliard School of Music where his teachers were Joseph Fuchs for the violin, Raphael Hillyer and Claus Adam (members of the Juilliard String Quartet) for chamber music, he switched to the viola and attended the Tel Aviv Academy of Music where he studied successively with Oeden Partos, Daniel Benyamini and Yair Kless. He was awarded in 1986 a master’s degree with highest honors.
Before joining the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra in 1989 as principal violist, Richard Assayas was a member of other major symphony orchestras: the Israel Philharmonic orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra. Extremely active in the field of chamber music, he was for many years the violist of the Van Leer Chamber Players with which he toured Italy, Mexico and Venezuela and recorded two CDs. Richard Assayas is a founding member of the Israel Contemporary Players with whom he has performed for 17 years in Israel and at festivals in Berlin, Dresden, Stuttgart and most recently at the 2007 Warsaw Autumn Festival.
In June 2006, Mr. Assayas performed the solo viola part (Sancho Panza) in Don Quixote (R. Strauss) with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein.
Mr. Assayas plays on a William Luff viola (London, 1977) graciously loaned to the JSO by Nurit Sharir and Ariel Margalit.