Aisha Syed Castro — born 15 September 1989 in Santiago de los Caballeros — is a Dominican violinist and the first Latin American ever admitted to London’s Yehudi Menuhin School.

A child prodigy in Santiago

The daughter of Saifuddin Syed, of Pakistani descent, and Carolina Castro, she began violin and flute at four at the Hogar de la Armonía in Santiago under Henry Disla, traveling twice weekly to Santo Domingo for lessons with Hipólito Javier Guerrero and later studying under Caonex Peguero. She joined the Orquesta Sinfónica Infantil at six and, at eleven, became the youngest soloist ever to perform with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, the same year she attended a violin symposium at the Juilliard School in New York.

Yehudi Menuhin School

In 2002, after a two-year audition process, she was admitted to the Yehudi Menuhin School in London on a British government scholarship — the first Latin American student the school had ever accepted.

Sharing a stage with the greats

In 2007 she performed alongside Michel Camilo at the Premios Casandra and shared a scene with the pianist Jeremy Menuhin. In March 2009, at Israel’s Eilat Festival, she performed under the direction of Maxim Vengerov alongside the violinists Julian Rachlin, Pavel Vernikov and Boris Kushnir and the violinist-comedian Aleksey Igudesman; that July, the Israeli composer Noam Sheriff chose her to give the world premiere of his concerto «Vísperas del Canario» at the Menuhin Festival Gstaad in Switzerland.

Recognition

In January 2009 she won an international competition among three thousand young musicians from twenty countries, and that same year the Premios Casandra named her its International Violinist.

Legacy

She has gone on to record albums including «Martinaitis» and to perform across Europe, the Americas and Asia, carrying the sound of a violin she first picked up at four in Santiago into concert halls the Dominican Republic rarely reaches.