Jacqueline Shave received her formal training at the Royal Academy of Music, but drew her particular performance inspiration and love of chamber music from her time at the Britten-Pears School in Snape. On leaving the Academy she became the leader of English Touring Opera, but soon made the decision to dedicate herself to chamber music, leading the Schubert Ensemble and then co-founding and leading the Brindisi Quartet for fifteen years, with whom she recorded and gave concerts worldwide.
Jackie is in demand as a guest leader with many of the UK’s leading orchestras and is also the violinist in the Britten Oboe Quartet with Nicholas Daniel.
In 2011 she took a year away to explore other musical pathways, which resulted in Postcards from Home, a world music/jazz CD in collaboration with Kuljit Bhamra (tabla) and John Parricelli (guitar). She also presented a complete Beethoven string quartet cycle on the Hebridean island of Harris, and gave a free improvisation concert in a cave on Hestur, in the North Atlantic Faroe Islands.
Jackie is writing more and more recently, and had a piece premiered in London by Britten Sinfonia and tenor Nicholas Mulroy entitled Three Landscapes for oboe quartet and voice set to poems of Laurie Lee, Clifford Dyment and WB Yeats.
Jacqueline plays on a Nicola Amati violin, from 1672.