About me
Natalia Duarte Jeremías is a Costa Rican musician and educator currently based in Reykjavik, Iceland. Her artistic practice combine historical performance, improvisation, and participatory music making especially targeted to families with young children. She holds a double major BA in viola performance and anthropology, and master's degrees in modern viola, historical performance and instrumental pedagogy.
As a performer, she has collaborated with several historically-informed orchestras and chamber ensembles in Europe, working with conductors like Alessandro de Marchi, Enrico Onofri, Rinaldo Alessandrini, Philippe Herreweghe, Giovanni Antonini, performing at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, Handel Festival in Halle, Roma Festival Barroco, Bologna Festival, Festival di Cremona, and others. As a chamber musician she has performed at the Utrecht Fringe Early Music Festival, Festival Grandezze e Meraviglie, for the Società del Quartetto di Milano, at FIAS Madrid, and the Festival Internacional de Música Barroca de Costa Rica. She has recorded with different ensembles for labels such as Naxos, CPO, Lindoro and Da Vinci.
In Iceland she has worked together with ensembles like Barokkbandið Brák, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Cauda Collective, Camerarctica, Capella Reykjavicensis, and Kammersveitar Breiðholts, performing in venues including Harpa, Skálholt summer festival, and Salurinn. She co-founded Kammerhópurinn ConsorTico with whom she took part at the first edition of the Reykjavik Early Music Festival in 2024.
As an educator, Natalia founded a pedagogical initiative inspired on Edwin Gordon’s Music Learning Theory (MLT) for babies and children from 0 to 5 years old. In 2024 she received a grant from The Children's Fund of Iceland (Barnamenningarsjóður) to develop her project 'A Music Moment/Tónlistarstund' in collaboration with the Nordic House. Natalia is also involved with educational projects with multicultural groups in Iceland, such as Tónagull and GETA Samtök. She has participated with workshops and music sessions at the children's festival Kátt Barnahátíð and Hamraborg Festival.
She studied in her homeland at the University of Costa Rica and privately with Jan Dobrzelewski, with Hong-Mei Xiao at the University of Arizona, Jonathan Brown and Emilio Moreno at ESMUC (Barcelona), Gianni de Rosa (Scuola Civica di Milano), Stefano Marcocchi (Conservatorio di Verona), and Fabrizio Scalabrin (Conservatorio di Padova). She has won several scholarships including stages with Nordic Baroque Orchestra (Trondheim, 2017), Academia Montis Regalis (Mondovì, 2018, 2019), and the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme scholarship (Aldeburgh, 2019). Currently she is pursuing a Ph.D in music education at the University of Iceland.