Dasha Serck, born in Leiden in 2003, is a violinist from Voorburg. She began her violin career at the age of six under the guidance of private teacher Valentina Punshina. At the age of eight, she joined the Young Talent Class at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. At age fourteen, she continued her studies in Utrecht at the Academy for Musical Talent (AMT) with Julia Dinerstein, and at age eighteen, she was admitted to the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, where she is currently in her fourth year of the bachelor’s program with Ilya Grubert.Dasha is very active in musical projects, masterclasses, and competitions. She has taken masterclasses with renowned musicians, including Sergei Krilov, Boris Kushnir, Daniël Rowland, Sergei Dogadin, Michael Kugel, Liza Ferschtman, and Tatiana Samoeil. Her international experience includes performances with orchestras, ensembles, and as a soloist in France, Poland, Russia, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. She has won numerous competition prizes. In 2017, she won first prize at both the Florence Music Competition and the Amstelveen Violin Competition. In 2020, she won first place at the Britten Competition, followed by third place at the Archipel Competition in 2021, the Academy Prize at the Princess Christina Competition in 2023, and first prize at the international Athenamuse Violin Competition in Venice in 2025.
Dasha has also performed in ensembles with leading musicians such as Daniël Rowland, Anna Fedorova, Nicholas Schwartz, Maja Bogdanovitch, Vital Stahievitch, Olivier Thierry, and Wouter Vossen. As a soloist, she has performed with ensembles such as the Britten String Orchestra, the Artoni Chamber Orchestra, the TOP Symphony Orchestra, the YTO Symphony Orchestra, the Flevoland Symphony Orchestra, and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra.
In her playing, Dasha focuses on exploring timbre and achieving technical mastery. She considers these aspects essential for expression and personality in violin playing.
The Musical Instrument Fund has loaned me a beautiful bow and violin. The bow is light and helps me execute difficult strokes and produce a wide variety of timbres. The violin has a beautiful timbre with a deep, warm G string and a lovely, bright E string, with good balance and sound distribution across all the strings. The violin resonates very well and is wonderfully suited to filling large concert halls completely with sound. I am therefore very pleased with my loaned instrument!
