Czech Chamber Music Society • Bell, Isserlis, Kissin

JOSHUA BELL
violin

With a career spanning more than thirty years as a soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, conductor and director, Joshua Bell is one of the most celebrated violinists of his era. His curiosity and clarity of insight are a testament to his belief in the power of music as a unifying cultural force. An artist of precision and passion, Bell is committed to the violin as an instrument of expression and a vehicle for realizing the new and unexplored.

Having performed with every major orchestra in the world on six continents, Bell continues to maintain engagements as soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. Since 2011, Bell has served as Music Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, succeeding Sir Neville Marriner, who formed the orchestra in 1958. Bell’s multifaceted interests range from performing the repertoire’s hallmarks to recording commissioned works, including Nicholas Maw’s Violin Concerto, for which Bell received a Grammy® award. He has also premiered works of John Corigliano, Edgar Meyer, Jay Greenberg, and Behzad Ranjbaran, continually exploring the boundaries of the repertoire and the instrument.

As an exclusive Sony Classical artist, Bell has recorded more than 40 albums garnering Grammy®, Mercury®, Gramophone and ECHO Klassik awards. Sony Classical’s most recent release in June 2018, with Bell and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, features Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and G minor Violin Concerto. Bell’s previous release, For the Love of Brahms in 2016, includes 19th-century repertoire with the Academy, Steven Isserlis, and Jeremy Denk. Bell’s 2013 release with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, featured him conducting Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh symphonies and debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts.

In 2007, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post story, centered on Bell performing incognito in a Washington, D.C. metro station, sparked an ongoing conversation regarding artistic reception and context. The feature inspired Kathy Stinson’s 2013 children’s book, The Man With The Violin, and a newly-commissioned animated film, with music by Academy Award-winning composer Anne Dudley. Stinson’s subsequent 2017 book, Dance With The Violin, illustrated by Dušan Petričić, offers a glimpse into one of Bell’s competition experiences at age 12. Bell debuted The Man With The Violin festival at the Kennedy Center in 2017, and, in March 2019, presents a Man With The Violin festival and family concert with the Seattle Symphony.

Bell advocates for music as an essential educational tool, as both a way for classical music to find diverse audiences, and also to deepen his audience’s connection to the art. He maintains active involvement with Education Through Music and Turnaround Arts, which provide instruments and arts education to children who may not otherwise be able to experience classical music firsthand. In 2014, Bell mentored and performed alongside National YoungArts Foundation string musicians in an HBO Family Documentary special, “Joshua Bell: A YoungArts Masterclass.” Bell continues to work alongside young talent to foster the next generation of classical music ambassadors, and currently serves as senior lecturer at his alma mater, the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Bell began the violin at the age of four, and at age twelve, began studies with his mentor, Josef Gingold. At age 14, Bell debuted with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 17 with the St. Louis Symphony. At age 18, Bell signed with his first label, London Decca, and received the Avery Fisher Career Grant. In the years following, Bell has been named 2010 “Instrumentalist of the Year” by Musical America, a 2007 “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, nominated for five Grammy® awards, and received the 2007 Avery Fisher Prize. He has also received the 2003 Indiana Governorʼs Arts Award and a Distinguished Alumni Service Award in 1991 from the Jacobs School of Music. In 2000, he was named an “Indiana Living Legend” and one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful.”

Bell performs on the 1713 Huberman Stradivarius violin, with a François Tourte 18th-Century bow.

Evgeny Kissin’s musicality, the depth and poetry of his interpretations, and his extraordinary virtuosity have won him respect and admiration, which he deserves as one of the most talented classical pianists of his generation. He is in demand internationally, and he has appeared as a soloist with the world’s top orchestras under the baton of such famed conductors as Claudio Abbado, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, and Seiji Ozawa.

Evgeny Kissin was born to a Russian Jewish family in Moscow, and he began playing piano and improvising at the age of two. At six years of age, he began studying at a Moscow school of music for talented children named after its founders, the Gnessin sisters. It was there that Anna Pavlovna Kantor became his only teacher. At age ten he appeared with an orchestra for the first time, and a year later he gave a solo recital. As a 12-year-old boy, he won international fame when a recording of his appearance with the Moscow State Philharmonic was issued on LP. That recording’s tremendous success led to the release of five more live recordings of Kissin’s performances over the next two years. Evgeny Kissin first appeared abroad in 1985, and over the following years he gave many tours and concerts all around the world. December 1988 saw the worldwide broadcast of Kissin’s appearance at the Berlin Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert under the baton of Herbert von Karajan.

Evgeny Kissin’s career has earned him many musical honours around the world. In 1991, for example, he was a special guest at the Grammy Awards Ceremony. Three years later, he became the youngest person honoured as the Instrumentalist of the Year by the magazine Musical America. He has received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from the Manhattan School of Music, the Shostakovich Award (one of Russia’s highest honours for musicians), an honorary membership of London’s Royal Academy of Music, and most recently the title of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Hong Kong.

He is a citizen of the United Kingdom and of Israel as well as of Russia. He has been living in Prague since 2017. His is a vocal critic of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.