Spanish-born violinist Francisco Fullana approaches music with a rare combination of vulnerability and presence. Born in Mallorca, an immigrant to the United States and a proud dual citizen, his work is deeply shaped by his Hispanic heritage and a lifelong engagement with sound as culture, language, and personal history. His playing is guided by an innate synesthesia that binds sound to the colors and emotional traces of an inner library built from memory and lived experience.
Fullana moves fluidly across centuries and idioms, from Baroque music on gut strings to Latin American concertos and the great works of the 20th century. What unites this wide repertoire is not versatility for its own sake, but an immersive way of working that treats each composer as a new language to be learned. Like a method actor, he channels the composer and their life, incorporating it into his own inner world until the music feels inhabited rather than interpreted.
When learning a new work, this immersion often extends far beyond the practice room. Fullana seeks physical and emotional environments that help him enter the sound world of a piece. Preparing Vivaldi has led him into Venetian kitchens, obscure manuscripts, and daily rituals of the lagoon. Working on Ginastera has drawn him toward stays within the indigenous communities of Latin America and Borges’ revolutionary Ficciones. Arturo Márquez’s Fandango Concerto brought him to learn the art of cave diving, literally immersing himself deep into the cenotes of the Yucatán, the Mayan’s sacred portals to Xibaba. His connection to Latin repertoire has taken him repeatedly to Mexico and across Latin America, where music, language, food, and rhythm feel inseparable from lived experience. These journeys are not symbolic gestures, but essential steps in how sound becomes meaning, and they also shape his latest collaborations: A new concerto by Latin Grammy winner Juan Pablo Contreras and his upcoming album release with conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto and the Sinfónica de Minería of the violin concertos of Ginastera and Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole.
Since childhood, Fullana has experienced synesthesia as a quiet but constant presence, linking sound to vivid visual and emotional memory. Music awakens a private archive of images, colors, and sensations that are deeply tied to his own origin story and the presence of his grandfather, the visual artist Gabriel Fullana. Through this lens, each work becomes permanently linked to an inner landscape. Performance becomes an act of recollection as much as expression, inviting audiences into a world where music is felt, seen, and inhabited. He is not only a violinist, but a painter of sound.
This heightened sensory awareness also fuels Fullana’s passion for curating programs that engage listeners across all their senses. In the coming season, Francisco will curate the opening season concert at The Frick Collection, alongside the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and centered around Goya’s The Forge, exploring themes of labor, ritual, and transformation through sounds ranging from flamenco to Boccherini. He is also curating the upcoming Solstice concerts at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as part of New York City’s Music in the Park series centered around The Four Seasons, an ode to the Sun and its never ending energy.
Fullana’s artistry has been recognized with honors including the Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Khaledi Prize, as well as being an artist of Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society. His recordings have reached over 10 million plays on Spotify and Apple Music, and have earned major accolades, including Instrumental Choice of the Month from BBC Music Magazine, which praised Bach’s Long Shadow for its depth and humanity, writing:
“Fullana manages to combine Itzhak Perlman’s warmth with the aristocratic poise of Henryk Szeryng.”
Chicago Classical Review captured the immediacy of his live performances:
“Fullana maintained an improvisatory quality, practically acting through his violin, all while maintaining technical perfection and sweetness of tone on his 1735 Guarneri.”
As a soloist, he has appeared with orchestras across the United States, Europe, and Latin America, collaborating with conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel, the late Sir Colin Davis, Hans Graf, Christoph Poppen, and Carlos Miguel Prieto. Recent and upcoming performances include engagements with the Utah, Buffalo, Phoenix, Indianapolis, Pacific, Minería, Castilla y León and Aachen Symphonies, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Radio Televisión Española and the Münchner Rundfunk Orchester, as well as the Saint Paul Chamber and Philadelphia Chamber Orchestras, among many others. His long-standing collaboration with Apollo’s Fire and conductor Jeannette Sorrell has been particularly formative, including his tenure as Artist in Residence and continued work as a frequent collaborator in historically informed performance. Their recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was named a Top Ten Album of the Year by The Times.
Alongside his performing career, Fullana is committed to shaping musical spaces that reflect inclusion, curiosity, and cultural continuity. He is the founder of the Fortissimo Foundation, which focuses on immersive residencies with youth orchestras and sustained work with young Latino musicians, creating environments where mentorship and identity are central to artistic growth. He also serves as Artistic Advisor of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and Artistic Director of the 210 Festival in Texas, where his interest in conductor-less performance and imaginative programming continues to evolve.
Fullana studied at the Royal Conservatory of Madrid and The Juilliard School, and counts the violinist Midori as a formative mentor whose influence continues to shape his musical and artistic values. He performs on the 1735 “Mary Portman” ex-Kreisler Guarneri del Gesù violin, kindly on loan from Clement and Karen Arrison through the Stradivari Society of Chicago. Miss Mary, as she’s known, is an instrument whose voice he treats not as a relic, but a living partner in their ongoing artistic journey.